Challenges and Limitations in Speech Recognition Technology:A Critical Review of Speech Signal Processing Algorithms,Tools and Systems

Speech recognition systems have become a unique human-computer interaction(HCI)family.Speech is one of the most naturally developed human abilities;speech signal processing opens up a transparent and hand-free computation experience.This paper aims to present a retrospective yet modern approach to the world of speech recognition systems.The development journey of ASR(Automatic Speech Recognition)has seen quite a few milestones and breakthrough technologies that have been highlighted in this paper.A step-by-step rundown of the fundamental stages in developing speech recognition systems has been presented,along with a brief discussion of various modern-day developments and applications in this domain.This review paper aims to summarize and provide a beginning point for those starting in the vast field of speech signal processing.Since speech recognition has a vast potential in various industries like telecommunication,emotion recognition,healthcare,etc.,this review would be helpful to researchers who aim at exploring more applications that society can quickly adopt in future years of evolution.

A Speech Cryptosystem Using the New Chaotic System with a Capsule-Shaped Equilibrium Curve

In recent years,there are numerous studies on chaotic systems with special equilibrium curves having various shapes such as circle,butterfly,heart and apple.This paper describes a new 3-D chaotic dynamical system with a capsule-shaped equilibrium curve.The proposed chaotic system has two quadratic,two cubic and two quartic nonlinear terms.It is noted that the proposed chaotic system has a hidden attractor since it has an infinite number of equilibrium points.It is also established that the proposed chaotic system exhibits multi-stability with two coexisting chaotic attractors for the same parameter values but differential initial states.A detailed bifurcation analysis with respect to variations in the system parameters is portrayed for the new chaotic system with capsule equilibrium curve.We have shown MATLAB plots to illustrate the capsule equilibrium curve,phase orbits of the new chaotic system,bifurcation diagrams and multi-stability.As an engineering application,we have proposed a speech cryptosystem with a numerical algorithm,which is based on our novel 3-D chaotic system with a capsule-shaped equilibrium curve.The proposed speech cryptosystem follows its security evolution and implementation on Field Programmable Gate Array(FPGA)platform.Experimental results show that the proposed encryption system utilizes 33%of the FPGA,while the maximum clock frequency is 178.28 MHz.

Automatic depression recognition by intelligent speech signal processing:A systematic survey

Depression has become one of the most common mental illnesses in the world.For better prediction and diagnosis,methods of automatic depression recognition based on speech signal are constantly proposed and updated,with a transition from the early traditional methods based on hand‐crafted features to the application of architectures of deep learning.This paper systematically and precisely outlines the most prominent and up‐to‐date research of automatic depression recognition by intelligent speech signal processing so far.Furthermore,methods for acoustic feature extraction,algorithms for classification and regression,as well as end to end deep models are investigated and analysed.Finally,general trends are summarised and key unresolved issues are identified to be considered in future studies of automatic speech depression recognition.

Adversarial Examples Protect Your Privacy on Speech Enhancement System

Speech is easily leaked imperceptibly.When people use their phones,the personal voice assistant is constantly listening and waiting to be activated.Private content in speech may be maliciously extracted through automatic speech recognition(ASR)technology by some applications on phone devices.To guarantee that the recognized speech content is accurate,speech enhancement technology is used to denoise the input speech.Speech enhancement technology has developed rapidly along with deep neural networks(DNNs),but adversarial examples can cause DNNs to fail.Considering that the vulnerability of DNN can be used to protect the privacy in speech.In this work,we propose an adversarial method to degrade speech enhancement systems,which can prevent the malicious extraction of private information in speech.Experimental results show that the generated enhanced adversarial examples can be removed most content of the target speech or replaced with target speech content by speech enhancement.The word error rate(WER)between the enhanced original example and enhanced adversarial example recognition result can reach 89.0%.WER of target attack between enhanced adversarial example and target example is low at 33.75%.The adversarial perturbation in the adversarial example can bring much more change than itself.The rate of difference between two enhanced examples and adversarial perturbation can reach more than 1.4430.Meanwhile,the transferability between different speech enhancement models is also investigated.The low transferability of the method can be used to ensure the content in the adversarial example is not damaged,the useful information can be extracted by the friendly ASR.This work can prevent the malicious extraction of speech.

Comparing Fine-Tuning, Zero and Few-Shot Strategies with Large Language Models in Hate Speech Detection in English

Large Language Models(LLMs)are increasingly demonstrating their ability to understand natural language and solve complex tasks,especially through text generation.One of the relevant capabilities is contextual learning,which involves the ability to receive instructions in natural language or task demonstrations to generate expected outputs for test instances without the need for additional training or gradient updates.In recent years,the popularity of social networking has provided a medium through which some users can engage in offensive and harmful online behavior.In this study,we investigate the ability of different LLMs,ranging from zero-shot and few-shot learning to fine-tuning.Our experiments show that LLMs can identify sexist and hateful online texts using zero-shot and few-shot approaches through information retrieval.Furthermore,it is found that the encoder-decoder model called Zephyr achieves the best results with the fine-tuning approach,scoring 86.811%on the Explainable Detection of Online Sexism(EDOS)test-set and 57.453%on the Multilingual Detection of Hate Speech Against Immigrants and Women in Twitter(HatEval)test-set.Finally,it is confirmed that the evaluated models perform well in hate text detection,as they beat the best result in the HatEval task leaderboard.The error analysis shows that contextual learning had difficulty distinguishing between types of hate speech and figurative language.However,the fine-tuned approach tends to produce many false positives.

Multi-Objective Equilibrium Optimizer for Feature Selection in High-Dimensional English Speech Emotion Recognition

Speech emotion recognition(SER)uses acoustic analysis to find features for emotion recognition and examines variations in voice that are caused by emotions.The number of features acquired with acoustic analysis is extremely high,so we introduce a hybrid filter-wrapper feature selection algorithm based on an improved equilibrium optimizer for constructing an emotion recognition system.The proposed algorithm implements multi-objective emotion recognition with the minimum number of selected features and maximum accuracy.First,we use the information gain and Fisher Score to sort the features extracted from signals.Then,we employ a multi-objective ranking method to evaluate these features and assign different importance to them.Features with high rankings have a large probability of being selected.Finally,we propose a repair strategy to address the problem of duplicate solutions in multi-objective feature selection,which can improve the diversity of solutions and avoid falling into local traps.Using random forest and K-nearest neighbor classifiers,four English speech emotion datasets are employed to test the proposed algorithm(MBEO)as well as other multi-objective emotion identification techniques.The results illustrate that it performs well in inverted generational distance,hypervolume,Pareto solutions,and execution time,and MBEO is appropriate for high-dimensional English SER.

Audio-Text Multimodal Speech Recognition via Dual-Tower Architecture for Mandarin Air Traffic Control Communications

In air traffic control communications (ATCC), misunderstandings between pilots and controllers could result in fatal aviation accidents. Fortunately, advanced automatic speech recognition technology has emerged as a promising means of preventing miscommunications and enhancing aviation safety. However, most existing speech recognition methods merely incorporate external language models on the decoder side, leading to insufficient semantic alignment between speech and text modalities during the encoding phase. Furthermore, it is challenging to model acoustic context dependencies over long distances due to the longer speech sequences than text, especially for the extended ATCC data. To address these issues, we propose a speech-text multimodal dual-tower architecture for speech recognition. It employs cross-modal interactions to achieve close semantic alignment during the encoding stage and strengthen its capabilities in modeling auditory long-distance context dependencies. In addition, a two-stage training strategy is elaborately devised to derive semantics-aware acoustic representations effectively. The first stage focuses on pre-training the speech-text multimodal encoding module to enhance inter-modal semantic alignment and aural long-distance context dependencies. The second stage fine-tunes the entire network to bridge the input modality variation gap between the training and inference phases and boost generalization performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed speech-text multimodal speech recognition method on the ATCC and AISHELL-1 datasets. It reduces the character error rate to 6.54% and 8.73%, respectively, and exhibits substantial performance gains of 28.76% and 23.82% compared with the best baseline model. The case studies indicate that the obtained semantics-aware acoustic representations aid in accurately recognizing terms with similar pronunciations but distinctive semantics. The research provides a novel modeling paradigm for semantics-aware speech recognition in air traffic control communications, which could contribute to the advancement of intelligent and efficient aviation safety management.

Based on STM32 of CNN Speech Keyword Command Recognition System

Speech recognition is a hot topic in the field of artificial intelligence.Generally,speech recognition models can only run on large servers or dedicated chips.This paper presents a keyword speech recognition system based on a neural network and a conventional STM32 chip.To address the limited Flash and ROM resources on the STM32 MCU chip,the deployment of the speech recognition model is optimized to meet the requirements of keyword recognition.Firstly,the audio information obtained through sensors is subjected to MFCC(Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient)feature extraction,and the extracted MFCC features are input into a CNN(Convolutional Neural Network)for deep feature extraction.Then,the features are input into a fully connected layer,and finally,the speech keyword is classified and predicted.Deploying the model to the STM32F429,the prediction model achieves an accuracy of 90.58%,a decrease of less than 1%compared to the accuracy of 91.49%running on a computer,with good performance.

Exploring Sequential Feature Selection in Deep Bi-LSTM Models for Speech Emotion Recognition

Machine Learning(ML)algorithms play a pivotal role in Speech Emotion Recognition(SER),although they encounter a formidable obstacle in accurately discerning a speaker’s emotional state.The examination of the emotional states of speakers holds significant importance in a range of real-time applications,including but not limited to virtual reality,human-robot interaction,emergency centers,and human behavior assessment.Accurately identifying emotions in the SER process relies on extracting relevant information from audio inputs.Previous studies on SER have predominantly utilized short-time characteristics such as Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients(MFCCs)due to their ability to capture the periodic nature of audio signals effectively.Although these traits may improve their ability to perceive and interpret emotional depictions appropriately,MFCCS has some limitations.So this study aims to tackle the aforementioned issue by systematically picking multiple audio cues,enhancing the classifier model’s efficacy in accurately discerning human emotions.The utilized dataset is taken from the EMO-DB database,preprocessing input speech is done using a 2D Convolution Neural Network(CNN)involves applying convolutional operations to spectrograms as they afford a visual representation of the way the audio signal frequency content changes over time.The next step is the spectrogram data normalization which is crucial for Neural Network(NN)training as it aids in faster convergence.Then the five auditory features MFCCs,Chroma,Mel-Spectrogram,Contrast,and Tonnetz are extracted from the spectrogram sequentially.The attitude of feature selection is to retain only dominant features by excluding the irrelevant ones.In this paper,the Sequential Forward Selection(SFS)and Sequential Backward Selection(SBS)techniques were employed for multiple audio cues features selection.Finally,the feature sets composed from the hybrid feature extraction methods are fed into the deep Bidirectional Long Short Term Memory(Bi-LSTM)network to discern emotions.Since the deep Bi-LSTM can hierarchically learn complex features and increases model capacity by achieving more robust temporal modeling,it is more effective than a shallow Bi-LSTM in capturing the intricate tones of emotional content existent in speech signals.The effectiveness and resilience of the proposed SER model were evaluated by experiments,comparing it to state-of-the-art SER techniques.The results indicated that the model achieved accuracy rates of 90.92%,93%,and 92%over the Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song(RAVDESS),Berlin Database of Emotional Speech(EMO-DB),and The Interactive Emotional Dyadic Motion Capture(IEMOCAP)datasets,respectively.These findings signify a prominent enhancement in the ability to emotional depictions identification in speech,showcasing the potential of the proposed model in advancing the SER field.

An Adaptive Hate Speech Detection Approach Using Neutrosophic Neural Networks for Social Media Forensics

Detecting hate speech automatically in social media forensics has emerged as a highly challenging task due tothe complex nature of language used in such platforms. Currently, several methods exist for classifying hatespeech, but they still suffer from ambiguity when differentiating between hateful and offensive content and theyalso lack accuracy. The work suggested in this paper uses a combination of the Whale Optimization Algorithm(WOA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to adjust the weights of two Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLPs)for neutrosophic sets classification. During the training process of the MLP, the WOA is employed to exploreand determine the optimal set of weights. The PSO algorithm adjusts the weights to optimize the performanceof the MLP as fine-tuning. Additionally, in this approach, two separate MLP models are employed. One MLPis dedicated to predicting degrees of truth membership, while the other MLP focuses on predicting degrees offalse membership. The difference between these memberships quantifies uncertainty, indicating the degree ofindeterminacy in predictions. The experimental results indicate the superior performance of our model comparedto previous work when evaluated on the Davidson dataset.

Analysis on the Translation Methods of the Reported Speech in German Academic Papers-Taking the Translation of“Die Internationalisierung der deutschen Hochschulen”as an Example

Reporting is essential in language use,including the re-expression of other people’s or self’s words,opinions,psychological activities,etc.Grasping the translation methods of reported speech in German academic papers is very important to improve the accuracy of academic paper translation.This study takes the translation of“Internationalization of German Universities”(Die Internationalisierung der deutschen Hochschulen),an academic paper of higher education,as an example to explore the translation methods of reported speech in German academic papers.It is found that the use of word order conversion,part of speech conversion and split translation methods can make the translation more accurate and fluent.This paper helps to grasp the rules and characteristics of the translation of reported speech in German academic papers,and also provides a reference for improving the quality of German-Chinese translation.

Chaotic Elephant Herd Optimization with Machine Learning for Arabic Hate Speech Detection

In recent years,the usage of social networking sites has considerably increased in the Arab world.It has empowered individuals to express their opinions,especially in politics.Furthermore,various organizations that operate in the Arab countries have embraced social media in their day-to-day business activities at different scales.This is attributed to business owners’understanding of social media’s importance for business development.However,the Arabic morphology is too complicated to understand due to the availability of nearly 10,000 roots and more than 900 patterns that act as the basis for verbs and nouns.Hate speech over online social networking sites turns out to be a worldwide issue that reduces the cohesion of civil societies.In this background,the current study develops a Chaotic Elephant Herd Optimization with Machine Learning for Hate Speech Detection(CEHOML-HSD)model in the context of the Arabic language.The presented CEHOML-HSD model majorly concentrates on identifying and categorising the Arabic text into hate speech and normal.To attain this,the CEHOML-HSD model follows different sub-processes as discussed herewith.At the initial stage,the CEHOML-HSD model undergoes data pre-processing with the help of the TF-IDF vectorizer.Secondly,the Support Vector Machine(SVM)model is utilized to detect and classify the hate speech texts made in the Arabic language.Lastly,the CEHO approach is employed for fine-tuning the parameters involved in SVM.This CEHO approach is developed by combining the chaotic functions with the classical EHO algorithm.The design of the CEHO algorithm for parameter tuning shows the novelty of the work.A widespread experimental analysis was executed to validate the enhanced performance of the proposed CEHOML-HSD approach.The comparative study outcomes established the supremacy of the proposed CEHOML-HSD model over other approaches.

Research on the Application of Second Language Acquisition Theory in College English Speech Teaching

The teaching of English speeches in universities aims to enhance oral communication ability,improve English communication skills,and expand English knowledge,occupying a core position in English teaching in universities.This article takes the theory of second language acquisition as the background,analyzes the important role and value of this theory in English speech teaching in universities,and explores how to apply the theory of second language acquisition in English speech teaching in universities.It aims to strengthen the cultivation of English skilled talents and provide a brief reference for improving English speech teaching in universities.

SPEECH ENHANCEMENT METHOD FOR LPC AUTOREGRESSIVE MODEL AND SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION OF COMMAND WORD RECOGNITION USED IN NOISY ENVIRONMENT

At present, almost all the systems and products for speech recognition are working in quiet environment and their performances are degraded or even can′t work when they are operated in high noisy environment. In this paper, after analyzing the features of speech and noise, a speech enhancement method for LPC autoregressive model for command words recognition used in noisy environment is proposed, and an experimental system is realized. In different background noisy environments, we conduct experiments about SNR, basic accuracy, noise resistant ability and system environment adaptability with different microphones. The experimental results show that the system has good recognition performance in high noisy environments. The system can resist many kinds of noises and meet the needs of application areas on the whole such as military, traffic, marketplace and factory etc.

Adaptive bands filter bank optimized by genetic algorithm for robust speech recognition system

Perceptual auditory filter banks such as Bark-scale filter bank are widely used as front-end processing in speech recognition systems.However,the problem of the design of optimized filter banks that provide higher accuracy in recognition tasks is still open.Owing to spectral analysis in feature extraction,an adaptive bands filter bank (ABFB) is presented.The design adopts flexible bandwidths and center frequencies for the frequency responses of the filters and utilizes genetic algorithm (GA) to optimize the design parameters.The optimization process is realized by combining the front-end filter bank with the back-end recognition network in the performance evaluation loop.The deployment of ABFB together with zero-crossing peak amplitude (ZCPA) feature as a front process for radial basis function (RBF) system shows significant improvement in robustness compared with the Bark-scale filter bank.In ABFB,several sub-bands are still more concentrated toward lower frequency but their exact locations are determined by the performance rather than the perceptual criteria.For the ease of optimization,only symmetrical bands are considered here,which still provide satisfactory results.

High Performance Speech Compression System

Since Pulse Code Modulation emerged in 1937, digitized speech has experienced rapid development due to its outstanding voice quality, reliability, robustness and security in communication. But how to reduce channel width without loss of speech quality remains a crucial problem in speech coding theory. A new full-duplex digital speech communication system based on the Vocoder of AMBE-1000(TM) and microcontroller ATMEL 89C51 is introduced. It shows higher voice quality than current mobile phone system with only a quarter of channel width needed for the latter. The prospective areas in which the system can be applied include satellite communication, IP Phone, virtual meeting and the most important, defence industry.

AN ANALYSIS OF ACOUSTIC CHARACTERISTICS OFCLEFT PALATE SPEECH WITH COMPUTERIZED SPEECH SIGNAL PROCESSING SYSTEM

The acoustic characteristics or the chinese vowels of 24 children with cleft palate and 10 normal control children were analyzed by computerized speech signal processing system (CSSPS),and the speech articulation was judged with Glossary of clert palate speech(GCPS).The listening judgement showed that the speech articulation was significantly different between the two groups(P<0.01).The objective quantitative measurement suggested that the formant pattern(FP)of vowels in children with cleft palate was different from that of normal control children except vowel[a](P< 0.05).The acoustic vowelgraph or the Chinese vowels which demonstrated directly the relationship of vocal space and speech perception was stated with the first formant frequence(F1)and the second formant frequence(F2).The authors conclude that the values or F1 and F2 point out the upward and backward tongue movement to close the clert, which reflects the vocal characteristics of trausmission of clert palate speech.

Arabic Speech Recognition System Based on MFCC and HMMs

Speech recognition allows the machine to turn the speech signal into text through identification and understanding process. Extract the features, predict the maximum likelihood, and generate the models of the input speech signal are considered the most important steps to configure the Automatic Speech Recognition System (ASR). In this paper, an automatic Arabic speech recognition system was established using MATLAB and 24 Arabic words Consonant-Vowel Consonant-Vowel Consonant-Vowel (CVCVCV) was recorded from 19 Arabic native speakers, each speaker uttering the same word 3 times (total 1368 words). In order to test the system, 39-features were extracted by partitioning the speech signal into frames ~ 0.25 sec shifted by 0.10 sec. in back-end, the statistical models were generated by separated the features into number of states between 4 to 10, each state has 8-gaussian distributions. The data has 48 k sample rate and 32-bit depth and saved separately in a wave file format. The system was trained in phonetically rich and balanced Arabic speech words list (10 speakers * 3 times * 24 words, total 720 words) and tested using another word list (24 words * 9 speakers * 3 times *, total 648 words). Using different speakers similar words, the system obtained a very good word recognition accuracy results of 92.92% and a Word Error Rate (WER) of 7.08%.

Robust Speech Recognition System Using Conventional and Hybrid Features of MFCC,LPCC,PLP,RASTA-PLP and Hidden Markov Model Classifier in Noisy Conditions

In recent years, the accuracy of speech recognition (SR) has been one of the most active areas of research. Despite that SR systems are working reasonably well in quiet conditions, they still suffer severe performance degradation in noisy conditions or distorted channels. It is necessary to search for more robust feature extraction methods to gain better performance in adverse conditions. This paper investigates the performance of conventional and new hybrid speech feature extraction algorithms of Mel Frequency Cepstrum Coefficient (MFCC), Linear Prediction Coding Coefficient (LPCC), perceptual linear production (PLP), and RASTA-PLP in noisy conditions through using multivariate Hidden Markov Model (HMM) classifier. The behavior of the proposal system is evaluated using TIDIGIT human voice dataset corpora, recorded from 208 different adult speakers in both training and testing process. The theoretical basis for speech processing and classifier procedures were presented, and the recognition results were obtained based on word recognition rate.

Investigation of Automatic Speech Recognition Systems via the Multilingual Deep Neural Network Modeling Methods for a Very Low-Resource Language, Chaha

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is vital for very low-resource languages for mitigating the extinction trouble. Chaha is one of the low-resource languages, which suffers from the problem of resource insufficiency and some of its phonological, morphological, and orthographic features challenge the development and initiatives in the area of ASR. By considering these challenges, this study is the first endeavor, which analyzed the characteristics of the language, prepared speech corpus, and developed different ASR systems. A small 3-hour read speech corpus was prepared and transcribed. Different basic and rounded phone unit-based speech recognizers were explored using multilingual deep neural network (DNN) modeling methods. The experimental results demonstrated that all the basic phone and rounded phone unit-based multilingual models outperformed the corresponding unilingual models with the relative performance improvements of 5.47% to 19.87% and 5.74% to 16.77%, respectively. The rounded phone unit-based multilingual models outperformed the equivalent basic phone unit-based models with relative performance improvements of 0.95% to 4.98%. Overall, we discovered that multilingual DNN modeling methods are profoundly effective to develop Chaha speech recognizers. Both the basic and rounded phone acoustic units are convenient to build Chaha ASR system. However, the rounded phone unit-based models are superior in performance and faster in recognition speed over the corresponding basic phone unit-based models. Hence, the rounded phone units are the most suitable acoustic units to develop Chaha ASR systems.