Contextual feature vectors for processing speech

Abstract

For any application that processes speech, improving the quality of the feature vectors may improve the quality of the speech application. The quality of feature vectors may be improved by modifying a neural network architecture for computing feature vectors to allocate computational resources where they are more effective for learning and computing the feature vectors. Contextual feature vectors may be computed from feature vectors by using a parameterized downsampling operation that decreases a vector sequence rate, processing the downsampled vectors with a neural network, and using a parameterized upsampling operation that increases a vector sequence rate. For example, parameterized downsampling may decrease a vector sequence rate by a factor of two, a neural may require fewer computational resources since it operates with a lower vector sequence rate, and parameterized upsampling may then increase the vector sequence rate by a factor of two.