Abstract: In one aspect, a method of speech signal processing using artificial intelligence, includes receiving, with at least one processor, a digital speech signal, converting, with the at least one processor, the digital speech signal to text, performing self-alignment pre-training of an encoder on entities and their synonyms, label attention training the pretrained encoder by aligning label-text joint representation to that of label synonym-text joint representations, and identifying, with the trained encoder, entities in a span in the text.