2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

Technical Program

Paper Detail

Paper IDHLT-9.1
Paper Title MAPGN: MAsked Pointer-Generator Network for Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training
Authors Mana Ihori, Naoki Makishima, Tomohiro Tanaka, Akihiko Takashima, Shota Orihashi, Ryo Masumura, NTT Corporation, Japan
SessionHLT-9: Style and Text Normalization
LocationGather.Town
Session Time:Wednesday, 09 June, 16:30 - 17:15
Presentation Time:Wednesday, 09 June, 16:30 - 17:15
Presentation Poster
Topic Human Language Technology: [HLT-MLMD] Machine Learning Methods for Language
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Virtual Presentation  Click here to watch in the Virtual Conference
Abstract This paper presents a self-supervised learning method for pointer-generator networks to improve spoken-text normalization. Spoken-text normalization that converts spoken-style text into style normalized text is becoming an important technology for improving subsequent processing such as machine translation and summarization. The most successful spoken-text normalization method to date is sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) mapping using pointer-generator networks that possess a copy mechanism from an input sequence. However, these models require a large amount of paired data of spoken-style text and style normalized text, and it is difficult to prepare such a volume of data. In order to construct spoken-text normalization model from the limited paired data, we focus on self-supervised learning which can utilize unpaired text data to improve seq2seq models. Unfortunately, conventional self-supervised learning methods do not assume that pointer-generator networks are utilized. Therefore, we propose a novel self-supervised learning method, MAsked Pointer-Generator Network (MAPGN). The proposed method can effectively pre-train the pointer-generator network by learning to fill masked tokens using the copy mechanism. Our experiments demonstrate that MAPGN is more effective for pointer-generator networks than the conventional self-supervised learning methods in two spoken-text normalization tasks.