Pre-trained Speech Representations as Feature Extractors for Speech Quality Assessment in Online Conferencing Applications
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Speech quality in online conferencing applications is typically assessed through human judgements in the form of the mean opinion score (MOS) metric. Since such a labor-intensive approach is not feasible for large-scale speech quality assessments in most settings, the focus has shifted towards automated MOS prediction through end-to-end training of deep neural networks (DNN). Instead of training a network from scratch, we propose to leverage the speech representations from the pre-trained wav2vec-based XLS-R model. However, the number of parameters of such a model exceeds task-specific DNNs by several orders of magnitude, which poses a challenge for resulting fine-tuning procedures on smaller datasets. Therefore, we opt to use pre-trained speech representations from XLS-R in a feature extraction rather than a fine-tuning setting, thereby significantly reducing the number of trainable model parameters. We compare our proposed XLS-R-based feature extractor to a Mel-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC)-based one, and experiment with various combinations of bidirectional long short term memory (Bi-LSTM) and attention pooling feedforward (AttPoolFF) networks trained on the output of the feature extractors. We demonstrate the increased performance of pre-trained XLS-R embeddings in terms a reduced root mean squared error (RMSE) on the ConferencingSpeech 2022 MOS prediction task.
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