We consider the task of unsupervised extraction of meaningful latent
representations of speech by applying autoencoding neural networks to speech
waveforms. The goal is to learn a representation able to capture high level
semantic content from the signal, e.g.\ phoneme identities, while being
invariant to confounding low level details in the signal such as the underlying
pitch contour or background noise. Since the learned representation is tuned to
contain only phonetic content, we resort to using a high capacity WaveNet
decoder to infer information discarded by the encoder from previous samples.
Moreover, the behavior of autoencoder models depends on the kind of constraint
that is applied to the latent representation. We compare three variants: a
simple dimensionality reduction bottleneck, a Gaussian Variational Autoencoder
(VAE), and a discrete Vector Quantized VAE (VQ-VAE). We analyze the quality of
learned representations in terms of speaker independence, the ability to
predict phonetic content, and the ability to accurately reconstruct individual
spectrogram frames. Moreover, for discrete encodings extracted using the
VQ-VAE, we measure the ease of mapping them to phonemes. We introduce a
regularization scheme that forces the representations to focus on the phonetic
content of the utterance and report performance comparable with the top entries
in the ZeroSpeech 2017 unsupervised acoustic unit discovery task.

本研究旨在通过自编码神经网络从语音波形中提取有意义的潜在表示，并比较三个变体：简单维度约束、高斯变分自编码器和离散量化矢量自编码器，成果表明此方法在 ZeroSpeech 2017 任务中获得了可比拟的表现。