Keynote speech 1: An integrated deep learning approach to acoustic signal pre-processing and acoustic modeling with applications to robust automatic speech recognition

We cast the classical speech processing problem into a new nonlinear regression setting by mapping log power spectral features of noisy to clean speech based on deep neural networks (DNNs). DNN-enhanced speech obtained by the proposed approach demonstrates better speech quality and intelligibility than those obtained with conventional state-of-the-art algorithms. Furthermore, this new paradigm also facilitates an integrated deep learning framework to train the three key modules in an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, namely signal conditioning, feature extraction and acoustic phone models, altogether in a unified manner. The proposed framework was tested on recent challenging ASR tasks in CHiME-2, CHiME-4 and REVERB, which are designed to evaluate ASR robustness in mixed speakers, multi-channel, and reverberant conditions. Leveraging upon this new approach, our team scored the lowest word error rates in all three tasks with acoustic pre-processing algorithms for speech separation, microphone array based speech enhancement and speech dereverberation.