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International audience; Machine learning (ML) and deep learning with deep neural networks (DNN), have drastically improved the performances of modern systems on numerous spoken language understanding (SLU) related tasks. Since most of current researches focus on new neural architectures to enhance the performances in realistic conditions, few recent works investigated the use of different algebras with neural networks (NN), to better represent the nature of the data being processed. To this extent, quaternion-valued neural networks (QNN) have shown better performances, and an important reduction of the number of neural parameters compared to traditional real-valued neural networks, when dealing with multidimensional signal. Nonetheless, the use of QNNs is strictly limited to quaternion input or output features. This paper introduces a new unsupervised method based on a hybrid autoencoder (AE) called real-to-quaternion autoencoder (R2H), to extract a quaternion-valued input signal from any real-valued data, to be processed by QNNs. The experiments performed to identify the most related theme of a given telephone conversation from a customer care service (CCS), demonstrate that the R2H approach outperforms all the previously established models, either real-or quaternion-valued ones, in term of accuracy and with up to four times fewer neural parameters.

Automatic transcription of spoken documents is affected by automatic transcription errors that are especially frequent when speech is acquired in severe noisy conditions. Automatic speech recognition errors induce errors in the linguistic features used for a variety of natural language processing tasks. Recently, denoisng autoencoders (DAE) and stacked autoencoders (SAE) have been proposed with interesting results for acoustic feature denoising tasks. This paper deals with the recovery of corrupted linguistic features in spoken documents. Solutions based on DAEs and SAEs are considered and evaluated in a spoken conversation analysis task. In order to improve conversation theme classification accuracy, the possibility of combining abstractions obtained from manual and automatic transcription features is considered. As a result, two original representations of highly imperfect spoken documents are introduced. They are based on bottleneck features of a supervised autoencoder that takes advantage of both noisy and clean transcriptions to improve the robustness of error prone representations. Experimental results on a spoken conversation theme identification task show substantial accuracy improvements obtained with the proposed recovery of corrupted features.

International audience; —This paper presents investigations about the automatic identification of video genre by audio channel analysis. Genre refers to editorial styles such commercials, movies, sports… We propose and evaluate some methods based on both low and high level descriptors, in cepstral or time domains, but also by analyzing the global structure of the document and the linguistic contents. Then, the proposed features are combined and their complementarity is evaluated. On a database composed of single-stories web-videos, the best audio-only based system performs 9% of Classification Error Rate (CER). Finally, we evaluate the complementarity of the proposed audio features and video features that are classically used for Video Genre Identification (VGI). Results demonstrate the complementarity of the modalities for genre recognition, the final audio-video system reaching 6% CER.