Author: grandjanitor

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grandjanitor Sphinx sphinx3 sphinxbase sphinxtrain Thought

The Grand Janitor’s Blog

For the last year or so, I have been intermittently playing with several components of CMU Sphinx.  It is an intermittent effort because I am wearing several hats in Voci.

I find myself go back to Sphinx more and more often.   Being more experienced, I start to approach the project again carefully: tracing code, taking nodes and understanding what has been going on.  It was humbling experience – speech recognition has changed, Sphinx has more improvement than I can imagine. 
The life of maintaining sphinx3 (and occasionally dip into SphinxTrain) was one of the greatest experience I had in my life.   Unfortunately, not many of my friends know.  So Sphinx and I were pretty much disconnected for several years. 
So, what I plan to do is to reconnect.    One thing I have done throughout last 5 years was blogging so my first goal is to revamp this page. 
Let’s start small: I just restarted RSS feeds.   You may also see some cross links to my other two blogs, Cumulomaniac, a site on my take of life, Hong Kong affairs as well as other semi-brainy topics,  and  333 weeks, a chronicle of my thoughts on technical management as well as startup business. 
Both sites are in Chinese and I have been actively working on them and tried to update weekly. 
So why do I keep this blog then?  Obviously the reason is for speech recognition.   Though, I start to realize that doing speech recognition has much more than just writing a speech recognizer.   So from now on, I will post other topics such as natural language processing, video processing as well as many low-level programming information.   
This will mean it is a very niche blog.   Could I keep up at all?  I don’t know.   As my other blogs, I will try to write around 50 messages first and see if there is any momentum. 
Arthur
Categories
cmu sphinx hieroglpyh Thought

Self Criticism : Hieroglyph

When I was working on CMU Sphinx, I was more an aggressive young guy and love to start many projects (still am).   So I started many projects and not many of them completed.   I wasn’t completely insane: what was lacking at that point of development is that we lack of passion and momentum.  So working on many things give a sense of we are moving forward.

One of the projects, which I feel I should be responsible, is the Hieroglyph.   It was meant to be a complete set of documentation for several Sphinx components work together.   But when I finished the 3rd draft, my startup work kicked in.    That’s why what you can see is only an incomplete form of the document.

Fast-forward 6 years later, it was unfortunate that the document is still the comprehensive source of sphinx if you want to understand the underlying structure/method of CMU Sphinx C-based executables.     The current CMU Sphinx encompasses way more than I decided to cover.   For example, the Java-based Sphinx4 has gained much followings.   And pocketsphinx is pretty much the de-facto speech recognizer for embedded speech recognition.

If you were following me (unlikely but possible), I have personally changed substantially.   For example, my job experience taught me that Java is a very important language and having a recognizer in Java would significantly boost the project.    I also feel embedded speech recognition is probably the real future of our life.

Back to Hieroglyph, suffice to say it is not yet a sufficient document.   I hope that I can go back to it and ask what I can do to make it better.

Arthur

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cmu sphinx cmu sphinx documentation

New Triplet is Released

Just learned from the CMUSphinx’s main site.  It sounds like there is a new triplet of sphinxbase and SphinxTrain released.

http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/2012/12/new-release-sphinxbase-0-8-pocketsphinx-0-8-and-sphinxtrain-0-8/

I took a look of the changes.   Most of the changes work towards better reuse between SphinxTrain and sphinxbase.   I think this is very encouraging.

There are around 600-700 SVN update since the last major release of triplet.   I think Nick and the SF guys are doing great jobs on the toolkit.

As for training,  one encouraging part is that there are efforts to improve the training procedure.   I have always been maintaining that model training is the heart of speech recognition.   A good model is the key of getting good speech recognition and performance.   And great performance is the key of getting great user experience.

When will CMU Sphinx walk on the right path?   I am still waiting but I am increasingly optimistic.

Arthur

(PS. I have nothing to do with this release.  Though, I guess it’s time to go back to actual open-source coding.)

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cmu sphinx cmu sphinx documentation

CMU Sphinx Documentation

I was browsing the documentation section of cmusphinx.org and was very impressed.   Compared to my ad-hoc version of documents back in www.cs.cmu.edu/~archan, or the old robust group document, it is a huge improvement.

What is the challenging to develop documentation for speech recognition? I believe the toughest part is that some people still see speech recognition as a programming task.  In real-life though, speech recognition application should be viewed as a data analysis task.

Here is why:  suppose you work on a normal programming task, once you figure out the algorithm, you job is pretty much done.

On a speech app though, that is just a tiny step towards a system which is good.  For example, you might notice that your dictionary is not refined enough such that some of the words are not recognized correctly.   Or you found that your language model has something wrong such that a certain trigrams never appears.

Those tasks, in terms of skill sets, require a person to stay in front of the Linux console, then come up with a Eureka moment : “Oh, that’s what’s wrong!”.    So the job “Speech Scientist” usually requires knowledge of statistics, machine learning and more generally good analytic skills.

Your basic Linux skill is also extremely important: e.g. a senior researcher once shows me how he did many things solely on perl one-liner.   As it turns out, when you can wield perl one-liner correctly, you can solve many text processing problem with one command!  This would save you a lot of time in writing a throw-away script and allow you to focus on analysis why things are going wrong.

Back to good speech application documentation:  one of the challenging part is to convey this real-life work-flow of Speech Scientist to the open source community.   Many of us learn (and thrive to learn more…)  this kind of skill in a hard way: writing reports, papers, presentations and be ready to get feedback from other people.  You will also find yourself  amazed by some brilliant insights and analyses too. (There are stupid analysis too but that’s parts of life……)

The Sphinx project collectively has gone a long way on this front of development.  If you have time, check out
http://cmusphinx.org/wiki,  I found much of material very useful.  Check it out!

The Grand Janitor.

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cmu sphinx decoder dictionary HTK Speech Recognition Thought training

What should be our focus in Speech Recognition?

If you worked in a business long enough, you start to understand better what type of work are important.   As many things in life, sometimes the answer is not trivial.   For example, in speech recognition, what are the important ingredients to work on?

Many people will instinctively say the decoder.  For many, the decoder, the speech recognizer, oorr the “computer thing” which does all the magic of recognizing speech, is the core of the works.

Indeed, working on a decoding is loads of fun.  If you a fresh new programmer, it is also one of those experiences, which will teach you a lot of things.   Unlike thousands of small, “cool” algorithms, writing a speech recognizer requires you to work out a lot of file format issues, system issues.   You will also touch a fairly advanced dynamic programming problem : writing a Viterbi search.   For many, it means several years of studying source code bases from the greats such as HTK, Sphinx and perhaps in house recognizers.

Writing a speech recognizer is also very important when you need to deal with speed issues.  You might want to fit a recognizer into your mobile phone or even just a chip.   For example, in Voci, an FPGA-based speech recognizer was built to cater ultra-high speed speech recognition (faster than 100xRT).   All these system-related issues required understanding of the decoder itself.

This makes speech recognition an exciting field similar to chess programming.  Indeed the two fields are very similar in terms of code development.   Both require deep understanding of search as a process. Both have eccentric figures popped up and popped out.   There are more stories untold than told in both field.  Both are fascinating fields.

There is one thing which speech recognition and chess programming are very different.   This is also a subtle point which even many savvy and resourceful programmers don’t understand.   That is how each of these machines derived their knowledge sources.   In speech, you need to have a good model to do decent jobs for your task.   In chess though, most programmers can proceed to write a chess player with the standard piece values.   As a result, there is a process before anyone can use a speech recognizer.  That is to first train an acoustic model and a language model.  

The same decoder, having different acoustic models and language models, can give users perceptions ranging from a total trainwreck to the a modern wonder, borderline to magic.   Those are the true ingredients of our magic.   Unlike magicians though, we are never shy to talk about these secret ingredients.   They are just too subtle to discuss.   For example, you won’t go to a party and tell your friends that “Using an ML estimate is not as good as using an MPFE estimate in speech recognition.  It usually results in absolutely 10% performance gap.”  Those are not party talks.  Those are talks when you want to have no friends. 🙂

In both type of tasks, one require learning different from a programming training.   10 years ago, those skill are generally carried by “Mathematician, Statistician or People who specialized in Machine Learning”.   Now there is new name : “Big Data Analyst”.

Before I stopped, let me mention another type of work, which are important in real life.  What I want to say is transcription and dictionary work.   If you asked some high-minded researchers in the field, they will almost think those are not interesting work.   Yet, in real-life, you can almost always learn something new and improve your systems based on them.  May be I will talk about this more next time.

The Grand Janitor

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Sphinx

Restart

Again, I feel rejuvenated.   Last few months of experience start to make me more unified both as a person and as a technical person.   When you start to work on something which draw up all you know in your life, you know that you are walking on the right path.

Things are starting to look more and more interesting.

The Grand Janitor

Categories
3.0 3.5 3.6 3.7 cmu sphinx sphinx 3

Development of Sphinx 3.X (X = 6 to 8) and its Ramification.

One of the things I have done back in Sphinx is to so called “Great Refactoring” of Sphinx 3, SphinxTrain and sphinxbase.   It was started by me but mostly took up by Dave (in a disgruntled manner 🙂 ).    I write this article to reflect the whole process and ask if I have done the right thing.

The background is like this: as you know, the CMU sphinx project has many recognizers.   Sphinx2, 3, 4, PocketSphinx and MultiSphinx.   It’s easy to understand why that happened in the first place.  CMU is an university and understandably would have many different types of projects.  In essence,  when someone think of a good new idea, they will simply implement a recognizer.  The by-product of it would be a PhD thesis or some kind of project reports.

There is nothing wrong with that.  Think of the pain of understanding and changing a recognizer which has 10-30 thousand lines of code, you will know that it is not for the faint of heart.  Many of the original programmers of the recognizers also have practical reason to ignore code re-usability – many of them have deadlines to meet.  So I always feel empathy towards them.

Of course, on the other side of the coin,  having many recognizers gives users a mild amount of pain.   Just to look at 3.0 and 3.3, command-line interface had changed (e.g. -meanfn becomes -mean).   So when people need to interface with the code,  it would take some understanding.   The bigger problem is that do you expect a certain feature appears in one of the decoders to appear in another?   This kind of inconsistency is very hard to explain to normal users.

So here comes the first change at 3.5, or around 6-7 years ago, I decided to merge 3.0’s series of tools and recognizer with 3.3, the fast decoder.  I got to say, the decision is mainly driven by young naivete and year-long insomnia.  ( 🙂 ).   There were also frustration from users which drove me to make those changes.  In 3.5, the main thing I did was just to “port” the tool from the old 3.0 such as allphone, astar, align to 3.x.   There are some command-line interface changes.   So far, all are cool.

Then it comes to 3.6, at this point, I started to realize a lot of underlying functions and libraries are duplicated.   For example, we have multiple GMM computation routines but you can’t use them in all tools which call GMM computation.   Like allphone in 3.5 used GMM computation, but you can’t expect any fast GMM computation in 3.4 can be used in allphone.  Simply because the library wasn’t shared.

So what did young and naive me thought?  Let’s try to write a single architecture to incorporate all these different things! (!!!!)  Now… this is what I think where things go wrong.

Let me explain a little bit more.  There is a legitimate reason why the original programmer (Ravi) decides to split the tools into multiple parts and let code duplicates.   Simply because, the issue in align is not necessarily the issue of decode.   If the programmer of align needs to consider issues of decode, then it will take a long time to really get any programming done.

This happens to be the case of Sphinx 3.X.  Now for the development of Sphinx 3.X, there was another undesirable factor.  That is I decided to leave – I simply couldn’t overcome the economic force at the time – a startup company is willing to hire me.

To complicate the matter,  we *also* decide to factor out common parts between SphinxTrain and sphinx3 to avoid code duplication between the two.   Again, it is driven by legitimate concern,  the fact that there were two feature extraction routines in two packages constantly make users ask themselves whether the front-end are matched.

All of these except I am leaving are good things but they just entail coding time.  Now the end effect is that it makes the effort too big, too time-consuming.  3.6 took me around 1 year to write and release. I release an official release at around mid of 2006 but there are still too many issues in the program.  The latter 3.8, Dave has taken up and really fixed many bugs.  So I always think it’s Dave to make sphinx 3.X in the current stable form.

To the credit of the guys in the team, they really bash me : Evandro, being circumspect and consistent, always asked if it is a good idea in the first place.   Ravi, always the wise man, had brought up the issues of merging the code.  And of course, there is Dave, he deserves most of the credits for fixing a lot of nasty bugs.

So, in fact, it is really I should be blamed in the process.  I guess I am finally mature enough to apologize to everyone.

So you may wonder why I said all of these?  Oh well, first of all, that’s because I am going to put work on the recognizers again.   Not just on Sphinx 3, but all other recognizers.  So my first hope is that I don’t repeat my past problems.

Now given the code is being iterated in last 6 years, the benefit of merging the code in Sphinx 3 starts to really show up.  People can do a lot of more things than the past.   Is it good enough?  I don’t think so.  Sphinx 3 has a lot of potentials but it’s very misunderstood.  In a nutshell, I need to put more work on it in the future.

The Grand Janitor

Categories
Thought

Being a programmer in your 20s and 30s

It’s funny how a person changes.  I always thought 20s was my best time.  It sort of was.   Generally, that was the moment you are energetic, can burn as much as you can, naively think that life, relationship can last forever. Also, you unconditionally trust other people.  

Things will turn when you are 30s, you start to realize your skill, your prowess to growth has a limit.  In exchange, you grow wiser.  In my case, I found my reads on people are much better, I start to go behind other people’s word and try to understand people’s intention.  I start to treasure genuine friendship, protest contrived politeness and faked honesty.

I also start to know when is the best time to be quiet and when is the best time to give a come back.  The former is important because if you are the only one who shine, your team will perpetually has the capability of one person, who is you.  

The latter is also important because if you are always quiet, there are just people who will step on your toes harder and harder.   They will think you are weak and can be bullied.   In real life, as in the time when you are in high-school, the bullies love to bully the weak.   Making sure they have a hard time to do so, is a very important life skill.

I will never go back to the time I can hack a program for 20 hours, sleep, and then hack it again for another 20 hours.  Will I feel regret about it? Probably not, in exchange, I learn that sometimes you can solve a 20-hour problem with 2 hour, you can still sleep and make a living.   For all that matter, it seems to be a better deal. 🙂

The Grand Janitor

Categories
Logios pocketsphinx Sphinx sphinx_fsttools

Start to look at the repository tree

Programming as a profession is a a strange one.   If you are a doctor, you can usually carry your knowledge and skills from one place to another provided that you have exactly the same tool.    If you are a programmer, you speed and skill are partially determined by the tools you build in house for a particular place.   So for example, I am not supposed to use any tool I built when I worked in the small video-advertising start-up.   Even if I can do something in 1 second at that period of time, if I change my job, I will need to restart and rebuild the tool again.   We are probably talking about days to rebuild the tool and weeks to refine it again.

There is one exception: if you worked in open source, much of your code would be stored in a public place.   Even when you have left your job for long time, it is legit for you to use it again.  You don’t have to solve the same problem again and again.   This is the beauty of open source and I am greatly benefited by it personally. 
As I start to regain my muscles in Sphinx, I start to notice that there are much changes in last 6 years.  Just look at the top level of Subversion:
File  Rev. Age Author Last log entry
 Parent Directory
 CLP/  10079  23 months  dhdfu  Finally add an -F argument to use the full path in the control file as the label…
PocketSphinxAndroidDemo/  11117  9 months  nshmyrev  Wrapper for nbest
 SimpleLM/  22  12 years  rickyhoughton  Initial revision
 Speech-Recognizer-SPX/  8933  3 years  nshmyrev  Update module to recent pocketsphinx API
 SphinxTrain/  11350  9 days  nshmyrev  Extract warped features during 000 stage if VTLN is enabled. See for detailsht…
 archive_s3/  7289  4 years  egouvea  Fixed error message in decoder script reporting failure in bw, and made result d…
 cmuclmtk/  11035  10 months  nshmyrev  Fixes bug in wngram2idngram and adds a test for it
 cmudict/  11348  3 weeks  air  cleaned up documentation and code (a bit) recompiled the dict
 gst-sphinx/  7848  4 years  dhdfu  Support changing language models at runtime (maybe)
 htk2s3conv/  11336  6 weeks  nshmyrev  Adds warning about different number of mixtures
 jsgfparser/  7230  4 years  dhdfu  Fix the main program to output the only public rule if no rule is specified, and…
 logios/  11339  4 weeks  tkharris  remove duplicated code
 misc_scripts/  10147  22 months  dhdfu  handle zero references
 multisphinx/  10945  12 months  dhdfu  clean up better and introduce vocabulary maps
 pocketsphinx/  11351  8 days  nshmyrev  Updated lat2dot script. I need to move it to the other location though
 pocketsphinx-extra/  9972  2 years  dhdfu  add sc models with mixture_weights and mdef.txt files
 scons/  5868  5 years  egouvea  updated the scons support to reflect that plugin.jar is now part of the package
 share/  5532  6 years  egouvea  Setting dsp and dsw files to have have windows EOL regardless where it’s downloa…
 sphinx2/  8767  3 years  egouvea  Updated the sphinx-2 MS files to MS .NET, consistent with the other packages, an…
 sphinx3/  11329  2 months  nshmyrev  Patch to solve memory issues in python module. See for detailshttps://bugzilla…
 sphinx4/  11344  3 weeks  nshmyrev  Properly sets logger for AudioFileDataSource. Thanks to Bandele Ola.
 sphinx_fsttools/  10791  14 months  nshmyrev  Some bit in AM to FST conversion
 sphinxbase/  11346  3 weeks  nshmyrev  Properly select buffer size when using audioresample. Thanks to balkce See fo…
 tools/  9009  3 years  nshmyrev  Updated to the latest release of sphinx4
 web/  10249  21 months  nshmyrev  There is no sphinx3 development anymore
How exciting is that?  You got only 6 to 7 top level directories 7 years ago!
From now on, I will start to put more notes on different tools in the repository. 
The Grand Janitor
Categories
cmu sphinx open source speech recognition

Getting back to the project…..

After several years not touching Sphinx (or for that regard, any serious coding), I start to have a conversation with myself, namely, the me who maintained Sphinx 3.X 6 years ago.

When I was working with the project, I was tasked to work on Sphinx 3.  I have been an advocate of Sphinx 3 ever since.  To say the truth, I might have overdone it – there are many great recognizers in the world.  Just look within the family: Sphinx 4, PocketSphinx and recently MultiSphinx by Dave are all great recognizers.  (Dave has also fixed a lot of my bugs.  So if you look into the source code, you will see places where he screamed, or I paraphrase “Arthur, what are you talking about?”)

Experience with many outside companies changed me.   I literally turned from a naive twenty something guy to a thirty something guy.   Still naive, but my world view has certainly changed.   In fact, for many purposes,  I found that learning all components of Sphinx is very beneficial.

Let’s think in this way:  each of the project from CMU Sphinx was meant to solve a practical problem in real life.  For example, in Sphinx 4, not only you have great out-of-the-box performance.  You also got the native code which can be incorporated into Java-based servers.  This is a huge plus when you are thinking of writing a web application.    And web applications will be around for a long time.

Same as PocketSphinx, it is meant to be a version of Sphinx which can be integrated different embedded systems.   I am yet to learn about MultiSphinx but I always have faith on Dave and his ideas.

This makes me want to learn again.  It’s weird, once you open your mind, you will see doors everywhere.   For me, my next targets would be learning Sphinx 4 and PocketSphinx.   Both of them have great importance.   Will I still work on Sphinx 3?  Probably.  X can always bigger than 8.  It’s the programming reality which makes me change.   As I would think now, it’s a good change, a very good change.

The Grand Janitor