Evaluating speech features with the minimal-pair ABX task: Analysis of the classical MFC/PLP pipeline

Thomas Schatz, Vijayaditya Peddinti, Francis Bach, Aren Jansen, Hynek Hermansky, Emmanuel Dupoux

Abstract: We present a new framework for the evaluation of speech rep- resentations in zero-resource settings, that extends and complements previous work by Carlin, Jansen and Hermansky [1]. In particular, we replace their Same/Different discrimination task by several Minimal-Pair ABX (MP-ABX) tasks. We explain the analytical advantages of this new framework and apply it to de- compose the standard signal processing pipelines for computing PLP and MFC coefficients. This method enables us to confirm and quantify a variety of well-known and not-so-well-known results in a single framework.