LAST: Language Model Aware Speech Tokenization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Turetzky, Arnon, Adi, Yossi
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Turetzky, Arnon
Adi, Yossi
author_facet Turetzky, Arnon
Adi, Yossi
contents Speech tokenization serves as the foundation of speech language model (LM), enabling them to perform various tasks such as spoken language modeling, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, etc. Most speech tokenizers are trained independently of the LM training process, relying on separate acoustic models and quantization methods. Following such an approach may create a mismatch between the tokenization process and its usage afterward. In this study, we propose a novel approach to training a speech tokenizer by leveraging objectives from pre-trained textual LMs. We advocate for the integration of this objective into the process of learning discrete speech representations. Our aim is to transform features from a pre-trained speech model into a new feature space that enables better clustering for speech LMs. We empirically investigate the impact of various model design choices, including speech vocabulary size and text LM size. Our results demonstrate the proposed tokenization method outperforms the evaluated baselines considering both spoken language modeling and speech-to-text. More importantly, unlike prior work, the proposed method allows the utilization of a single pre-trained LM for processing both speech and text inputs, setting it apart from conventional tokenization approaches.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_03701
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LAST: Language Model Aware Speech Tokenization
Turetzky, Arnon
Adi, Yossi
Computation and Language
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
Speech tokenization serves as the foundation of speech language model (LM), enabling them to perform various tasks such as spoken language modeling, text-to-speech, speech-to-text, etc. Most speech tokenizers are trained independently of the LM training process, relying on separate acoustic models and quantization methods. Following such an approach may create a mismatch between the tokenization process and its usage afterward. In this study, we propose a novel approach to training a speech tokenizer by leveraging objectives from pre-trained textual LMs. We advocate for the integration of this objective into the process of learning discrete speech representations. Our aim is to transform features from a pre-trained speech model into a new feature space that enables better clustering for speech LMs. We empirically investigate the impact of various model design choices, including speech vocabulary size and text LM size. Our results demonstrate the proposed tokenization method outperforms the evaluated baselines considering both spoken language modeling and speech-to-text. More importantly, unlike prior work, the proposed method allows the utilization of a single pre-trained LM for processing both speech and text inputs, setting it apart from conventional tokenization approaches.
title LAST: Language Model Aware Speech Tokenization
topic Computation and Language
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.03701