Explaining deep learning models for speech enhancement
(3 minutes introduction)
| Sunit Sivasankaran (Microsoft, USA), Emmanuel Vincent (Loria (UMR 7503), France), Dominique Fohr (Loria (UMR 7503), France) |
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We consider the problem of explaining the robustness of neural networks used to compute time-frequency masks for speech enhancement to mismatched noise conditions. We employ the Deep SHapley Additive exPlanations (DeepSHAP) feature attribution method to quantify the contribution of every time-frequency bin in the input noisy speech signal to every time-frequency bin in the output time-frequency mask. We define an objective metric — referred to as the speech relevance score — that summarizes the obtained SHAP values and show that it correlates with the enhancement performance, as measured by the word error rate on the CHiME-4 real evaluation dataset. We use the speech relevance score to explain the generalization ability of three speech enhancement models trained using synthetically generated speech-shaped noise, noise from a professional sound effects library, or real CHiME-4 noise. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on neural network explainability in the context of speech enhancement.
