In this paper, we investigate a deep learning approach for speech denoising through an efficient ensemble of specialist neural networks. By splitting up the speech denoising task into non-overlapping subproblems and introducing a classifier, we are able to improve denoising performance while also reducing computational complexity. More specifically, the proposed model incorporates a gating network which assigns noisy speech signals to an appropriate specialist network based on either speech degradation level or speaker gender.In our experiments, a baseline recurrent network is compared against an ensemble of similarly-designed smaller recurrent networks regulated by the auxiliary gating network. Using stochastically generated batches from a large noisy speech corpus, the proposed model learns to estimate a time-frequency masking matrix based on the magnitude spectrogram of an input mixture signal. Both baseline and specialist networks are trained to estimate the ideal ratio mask, while the gating network is trained to perform subproblem classification. Our findings demonstrate that a fine-tuned ensemble network is able to exceed the speech denoising capabilities of a generalist network, doing so with fewer model parameters.

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Podcast episodes often contain material extraneous to the main content, such as advertisements, interleaved within the audio and the written descriptions. We present classifiers that leverage both textual and listening patterns in order to detect such content in podcast descriptions and audio transcripts. We demonstrate that our models are effective by evaluating them on the downstream task of podcast summarization and show that we can substantively improve ROUGE scores and reduce the extraneous content generated in the summaries.