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

Abstract

We present a new framework for the evaluation of speech representations 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 decompose 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.