Exploring the Benefits of Tokenization of Discrete Acoustic Units

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Dekel, Avihu, Fernandez, Raul
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Dekel, Avihu
Fernandez, Raul
author_facet Dekel, Avihu
Fernandez, Raul
contents Tokenization algorithms that merge the units of a base vocabulary into larger, variable-rate units have become standard in natural language processing tasks. This idea, however, has been mostly overlooked when the vocabulary consists of phonemes or Discrete Acoustic Units (DAUs), an audio-based representation that is playing an increasingly important role due to the success of discrete language-modeling techniques. In this paper, we showcase the advantages of tokenization of phonetic units and of DAUs on three prediction tasks: grapheme-to-phoneme, grapheme-to-DAUs, and unsupervised speech generation using DAU language modeling. We demonstrate that tokenization yields significant improvements in terms of performance, as well as training and inference speed, across all three tasks. We also offer theoretical insights to provide some explanation for the superior performance observed.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_05547
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring the Benefits of Tokenization of Discrete Acoustic Units
Dekel, Avihu
Fernandez, Raul
Sound
Computation and Language
Audio and Speech Processing
Tokenization algorithms that merge the units of a base vocabulary into larger, variable-rate units have become standard in natural language processing tasks. This idea, however, has been mostly overlooked when the vocabulary consists of phonemes or Discrete Acoustic Units (DAUs), an audio-based representation that is playing an increasingly important role due to the success of discrete language-modeling techniques. In this paper, we showcase the advantages of tokenization of phonetic units and of DAUs on three prediction tasks: grapheme-to-phoneme, grapheme-to-DAUs, and unsupervised speech generation using DAU language modeling. We demonstrate that tokenization yields significant improvements in terms of performance, as well as training and inference speed, across all three tasks. We also offer theoretical insights to provide some explanation for the superior performance observed.
title Exploring the Benefits of Tokenization of Discrete Acoustic Units
topic Sound
Computation and Language
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.05547