How should we use domain knowledge in the era of deep learning? (A perspective from speech processing)

Deep neural networks are the new default machine learning approach in many domains, such as computer vision, speech processing, and natural language processing. Given sufficient data for a target task, end-to-end models can be learned with fairly simple, almost universal algorithms. Such models learn their own internal representations, which in many cases appear to be similar to human-engineered ones. This may lead us to wonder whether domain-specific techniques or domain knowledge are needed at all.

This talk will provide a perspective on these issues from the domain of speech processing. It will discuss when and how domain knowledge can be helpful, and describe two lines of work attempting to take advantage of such knowledge without compromising the benefits of deep learning. The main application will be speech recognition, but the techniques discussed are general.