Towards Dog Bark Decoding: Leveraging Human Speech Processing for Automated Bark Classification
Artem Abzaliev, Humberto Perez-Espinosa, Rada Mihalcea
Abstract
Similar to humans, animals make extensive use of verbal and non-verbal forms of communication, including a large range of audio signals. In this paper, we address dog vocalizations and explore the use of self-supervised speech representation models pre-trained on human speech to address dog bark classification tasks that find parallels in human-centered tasks in speech recognition. We specifically address four tasks: dog recognition, breed identification, gender classification, and context grounding. We show that using speech embedding representations significantly improves over simpler classification baselines. Further, we also find that models pre-trained on large human speech acoustics can provide additional performance boosts on several tasks.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{abzaliev-etal-2024-towards,
title = "Towards Dog Bark Decoding: Leveraging Human Speech Processing for Automated Bark Classification",
author = "Abzaliev, Artem and
Perez-Espinosa, Humberto and
Mihalcea, Rada",
editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta and
Kan, Min-Yen and
Hoste, Veronique and
Lenci, Alessandro and
Sakti, Sakriani and
Xue, Nianwen",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
month = may,
year = "2024",
address = "Torino, Italia",
publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1432/",
pages = "16480--16486"
}