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.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1432
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
16480–16486
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1432
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Artem Abzaliev, Humberto Perez-Espinosa, and Rada Mihalcea. 2024. Towards Dog Bark Decoding: Leveraging Human Speech Processing for Automated Bark Classification. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 16480–16486, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Dog Bark Decoding: Leveraging Human Speech Processing for Automated Bark Classification (Abzaliev et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1432.pdf