We present a first attempt to perform attentional word segmentation directly from the speech signal, with the final goal to automatically identify lexical units in a low-resource, unwritten language (UL). Our methodology assumes a pairing between recordings in the UL with translations in a well-resourced language. It uses Acoustic Unit Discovery (AUD) to convert speech into a sequence of pseudo-phones that is segmented using neural soft-alignments produced by a neural machine translation model. Evaluation uses an actual Bantu UL, Mboshi; comparisons to monolingual and bilingual baselines illustrate the potential of attentional word segmentation for language documentation.

这篇研究是对注意力词分割的首次尝试，通过从语音信号中直接进行词分割，最终目标是在低资源的口头语言中自动识别词汇单位。该方法假定在UL语言中的记录与资源充足的语言中的翻译相配对。使用声学单元发现（AUD）将语音转换为伪音段序列，然后使用神经机器翻译模型产生的神经软对齐来分割语音。该研究使用班图语Mboshi作为实际的UL，并与单语和双语基线进行比较，说明了注意力词分割在语言记录方面的潜力。

使用关注力的无监督语音词语切分