No Arabic abstract
The transcriptions used to train an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system may contain errors. Usually, either a quality control stage discards transcriptions with too many errors, or the noisy transcriptions are used as is. We introduce Lead2Gold, a method to train an ASR system that exploits the full potential of noisy transcriptions. Based on a noise model of transcription errors, Lead2Gold searches for better transcriptions of the training data with a beam search that takes this noise model into account. The beam search is differentiable and does not require a forced alignment step, thus the whole system is trained end-to-end. Lead2Gold can be viewed as a new loss function that can be used on top of any sequence-to-sequence deep neural network. We conduct proof-of-concept experiments on noisy transcriptions generated from letter corruptions with different noise levels. We show that Lead2Gold obtains a better ASR accuracy than a competitive baseline which does not account for the (artificially-introduced) transcription noise.
Cross-lingual speech adaptation aims to solve the problem of leveraging multiple rich-resource languages to build models for a low-resource target language. Since the low-resource language has limited training data, speech recognition models can easily overfit. In this paper, we propose to use adapters to investigate the performance of multiple adapters for parameter-efficient cross-lingual speech adaptation. Based on our previous MetaAdapter that implicitly leverages adapters, we propose a novel algorithms called SimAdapter for explicitly learning knowledge from adapters. Our algorithm leverages adapters which can be easily integrated into the Transformer structure.MetaAdapter leverages meta-learning to transfer the general knowledge from training data to the test language. SimAdapter aims to learn the similarities between the source and target languages during fine-tuning using the adapters. We conduct extensive experiments on five-low-resource languages in Common Voice dataset. Results demonstrate that our MetaAdapter and SimAdapter methods can reduce WER by 2.98% and 2.55% with only 2.5% and 15.5% of trainable parameters compared to the strong full-model fine-tuning baseline. Moreover, we also show that these two novel algorithms can be integrated for better performance with up to 3.55% relative WER reduction.
End-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are increasingly popular due to their relative architectural simplicity and competitive performance. However, even though the average accuracy of these systems may be high, the performance on rare content words often lags behind hybrid ASR systems. To address this problem, second-pass rescoring is often applied leveraging upon language modeling. In this paper, we propose a second-pass system with multi-task learning, utilizing semantic targets (such as intent and slot prediction) to improve speech recognition performance. We show that our rescoring model trained with these additional tasks outperforms the baseline rescoring model, trained with only the language modeling task, by 1.4% on a general test and by 2.6% on a rare word test set in terms of word-error-rate relative (WERR). Our best ASR system with multi-task LM shows 4.6% WERR deduction compared with RNN Transducer only ASR baseline for rare words recognition.
Speech recognition is largely taking advantage of deep learning, showing that substantial benefits can be obtained by modern Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs). The most popular RNNs are Long Short-Term Memory (LSTMs), which typically reach state-of-the-art performance in many tasks thanks to their ability to learn long-term dependencies and robustness to vanishing gradients. Nevertheless, LSTMs have a rather complex design with three multiplicative gates, that might impair their efficient implementation. An attempt to simplify LSTMs has recently led to Gated Recurrent Units (GRUs), which are based on just two multiplicative gates. This paper builds on these efforts by further revising GRUs and proposing a simplified architecture potentially more suitable for speech recognition. The contribution of this work is two-fold. First, we suggest to remove the reset gate in the GRU design, resulting in a more efficient single-gate architecture. Second, we propose to replace tanh with ReLU activations in the state update equations. Results show that, in our implementation, the revised architecture reduces the per-epoch training time with more than 30% and consistently improves recognition performance across different tasks, input features, and noisy conditions when compared to a standard GRU.
One crucial challenge of real-world multilingual speech recognition is the long-tailed distribution problem, where some resource-rich languages like English have abundant training data, but a long tail of low-resource languages have varying amounts of limited training data. To overcome the long-tail problem, in this paper, we propose Adapt-and-Adjust (A2), a transformer-based multi-task learning framework for end-to-end multilingual speech recognition. The A2 framework overcomes the long-tail problem via three techniques: (1) exploiting a pretrained multilingual language model (mBERT) to improve the performance of low-resource languages; (2) proposing dual adapters consisting of both language-specific and language-agnostic adaptation with minimal additional parameters; and (3) overcoming the class imbalance, either by imposing class priors in the loss during training or adjusting the logits of the softmax output during inference. Extensive experiments on the CommonVoice corpus show that A2 significantly outperforms conventional approaches.
Much recent work on Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) falls short in at least one of three ways: models were trained on oracle text input and neglected the Automatics Speech Recognition (ASR) outputs, models were trained to predict only intents without the slot values, or models were trained on a large amount of in-house data. We proposed a clean and general framework to learn semantics directly from speech with semi-supervision from transcribed speech to address these. Our framework is built upon pretrained end-to-end (E2E) ASR and self-supervised language models, such as BERT, and fine-tuned on a limited amount of target SLU corpus. In parallel, we identified two inadequate settings under which SLU models have been tested: noise-robustness and E2E semantics evaluation. We tested the proposed framework under realistic environmental noises and with a new metric, the slots edit F1 score, on two public SLU corpora. Experiments show that our SLU framework with speech as input can perform on par with those with oracle text as input in semantics understanding, while environmental noises are present, and a limited amount of labeled semantics data is available.