Perspectives on Speech Separation -- A Workshop

最不利于语言交流的情况是，当语音信号被嵌入到其他干扰语音的背景中，例如人群噪音或混响室中目标语音的回声。众所周知，在这种“鸡尾酒会”的情况下，老年人的言语理解尤其困难，即使对那些听力相对较好的人也是如此。在过去的25年里，实验心理学家、听力学家和神经科学家收集的数据揭示了分离语音来源过程的一些重要特征，以及它的功能障碍，并开发了一些模型来解释和预测人类在“鸡尾酒会”环境中的表现。由于同样的数据，以及人类在如此困难的条件下的听力表现有其局限性，信息科学家对寻找语音分离的计算解决方案越来越感兴趣。在过去的10-15年里，各种旨在通过过滤不需要的语音和增强目标语音来实现语音源自动分离的计算方案得到了前所未有的发展。然而，对于这项工作的旁观者来说，这个问题似乎没有普遍的解决办法。由于事实、模型和方案分散在不同的科学领域和特定的子领域，任何解决方案都可能需要这些不同学科的科学家共同努力才能取得成果。这个多学科的国际研讨会的目标是召集一个由大约20位科学家专家组成的特邀小组，他们的工作代表了各自学科中言语分离的前沿。在为期两天的时间里，这些专家将展示他们自己的研究并讨论彼此的研究，此外还将参加一般性的讨论，讨论语音分离研究的现状和未来趋势。讲习班还将编写一份报告，其中载有所有发言以及讨论的要点。

The situation that may be the most detrimental to verbal communication is when a speech signal is embedded in a background of other, interfering speech, such as crowd noise or echoes of the target speech in a reverberant room. It is also known that speech understanding in such a "cocktail-party" situation is especially difficult for elderly individuals, even for those with relatively good hearing. Over the last 25 years, data collected by experimental psychologists, audiologists, and neuroscientists have unveiled some important characteristics of the process of separating speech sources, as well of its dysfunction, and developed models to explain and predict human performance in "cocktail-party" settings. Motivated by the same data, and by the fact that human listening performance under such difficult conditions has its limits, information scientists have become increasingly interested in finding computational solutions to speech separation. The last 10-15 years have generated an unprecedented rush toward the development of diverse computational schemes aimed at automatic separation of speech sources by filtering out unwanted speech and enhancing the target. Nevertheless, to the onlooker of this work there appears to be no general solution to this problem. Because the facts, models, and schemes are dispersed over different scientific fields and in specific sub-areas, it is likely that for any solution to bear fruit requires a concerted effort among scientists from these various disciplines.The objective of this multidisciplinary, international workshop is to bring together an invited panel of around twenty scientist-experts whose work represents the cutting edge of speech separation within their particular discipline. Over a two-day period, these experts will present their own and discuss each other's research, in addition to taking part in general discussions in which the current status and future trends of speech separation research will be examined. The workshop will also produce a report containing all presentations, as well as highlights of the discussions.