No Arabic abstract
The end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) offers several advantages over previous efforts for recognizing speech. However, in reverberant conditions, E2E ASR is a challenging task as the long-term sub-band envelopes of the reverberant speech are temporally smeared. In this paper, we develop a feature enhancement approach using a neural model operating on sub-band temporal envelopes. The temporal envelopes are modeled using the framework of frequency domain linear prediction (FDLP). The neural enhancement model proposed in this paper performs an envelope gain based enhancement of temporal envelopes. The model architecture consists of a combination of convolutional and long short term memory (LSTM) neural network layers. Further, the envelope dereverberation, feature extraction and acoustic modeling using transformer based E2E ASR can all be jointly optimized for the speech recognition task. The joint optimization ensures that the dereverberation model targets the ASR cost function. We perform E2E speech recognition experiments on the REVERB challenge dataset as well as on the VOiCES dataset. In these experiments, the proposed joint modeling approach yields significant improvements compared to baseline E2E ASR system (average relative improvements of 21% on the REVERB challenge dataset and about 10% on the VOiCES dataset).
The task of speech recognition in far-field environments is adversely affected by the reverberant artifacts that elicit as the temporal smearing of the sub-band envelopes. In this paper, we develop a neural model for speech dereverberation using the long-term sub-band envelopes of speech. The sub-band envelopes are derived using frequency domain linear prediction (FDLP) which performs an autoregressive estimation of the Hilbert envelopes. The neural dereverberation model estimates the envelope gain which when applied to reverberant signals suppresses the late reflection components in the far-field signal. The dereverberated envelopes are used for feature extraction in speech recognition. Further, the sequence of steps involved in envelope dereverberation, feature extraction and acoustic modeling for ASR can be implemented as a single neural processing pipeline which allows the joint learning of the dereverberation network and the acoustic model. Several experiments are performed on the REVERB challenge dataset, CHiME-3 dataset and VOiCES dataset. In these experiments, the joint learning of envelope dereverberation and acoustic model yields significant performance improvements over the baseline ASR system based on log-mel spectrogram as well as other past approaches for dereverberation (average relative improvements of 10-24% over the baseline system). A detailed analysis on the choice of hyper-parameters and the cost function involved in envelope dereverberation is also provided.
Despite successful applications of end-to-end approaches in multi-channel speech recognition, the performance still degrades severely when the speech is corrupted by reverberation. In this paper, we integrate the dereverberation module into the end-to-end multi-channel speech recognition system and explore two different frontend architectures. First, a multi-source mask-based weighted prediction error (WPE) module is incorporated in the frontend for dereverberation. Second, another novel frontend architecture is proposed, which extends the weighted power minimization distortionless response (WPD) convolutional beamformer to perform simultaneous separation and dereverberation. We derive a new formulation from the original WPD, which can handle multi-source input, and replace eigenvalue decomposition with the matrix inverse operation to make the back-propagation algorithm more stable. The above two architectures are optimized in a fully end-to-end manner, only using the speech recognition criterion. Experiments on both spatialized wsj1-2mix corpus and REVERB show that our proposed model outperformed the conventional methods in reverberant scenarios.
Non-autoregressive transformer models have achieved extremely fast inference speed and comparable performance with autoregressive sequence-to-sequence models in neural machine translation. Most of the non-autoregressive transformers decode the target sequence from a predefined-length mask sequence. If the predefined length is too long, it will cause a lot of redundant calculations. If the predefined length is shorter than the length of the target sequence, it will hurt the performance of the model. To address this problem and improve the inference speed, we propose a spike-triggered non-autoregressive transformer model for end-to-end speech recognition, which introduces a CTC module to predict the length of the target sequence and accelerate the convergence. All the experiments are conducted on a public Chinese mandarin dataset AISHELL-1. The results show that the proposed model can accurately predict the length of the target sequence and achieve a competitive performance with the advanced transformers. Whats more, the model even achieves a real-time factor of 0.0056, which exceeds all mainstream speech recognition models.
This article describes an efficient end-to-end speech translation (E2E-ST) framework based on non-autoregressive (NAR) models. End-to-end speech translation models have several advantages over traditional cascade systems such as inference latency reduction. However, conventional AR decoding methods are not fast enough because each token is generated incrementally. NAR models, however, can accelerate the decoding speed by generating multiple tokens in parallel on the basis of the token-wise conditional independence assumption. We propose a unified NAR E2E-ST framework called Orthros, which has an NAR decoder and an auxiliary shallow AR decoder on top of the shared encoder. The auxiliary shallow AR decoder selects the best hypothesis by rescoring multiple candidates generated from the NAR decoder in parallel (parallel AR rescoring). We adopt conditional masked language model (CMLM) and a connectionist temporal classification (CTC)-based model as NAR decoders for Orthros, referred to as Orthros-CMLM and Orthros-CTC, respectively. We also propose two training methods to enhance the CMLM decoder. Experimental evaluations on three benchmark datasets with six language directions demonstrated that Orthros achieved large improvements in translation quality with a very small overhead compared with the baseline NAR model. Moreover, the Conformer encoder architecture enabled large quality improvements, especially for CTC-based models. Orthros-CTC with the Conformer encoder increased decoding speed by 3.63x on CPU with translation quality comparable to that of an AR model.
Recently, the end-to-end approach has been successfully applied to multi-speaker speech separation and recognition in both single-channel and multichannel conditions. However, severe performance degradation is still observed in the reverberant and noisy scenarios, and there is still a large performance gap between anechoic and reverberant conditions. In this work, we focus on the multichannel multi-speaker reverberant condition, and propose to extend our previous framework for end-to-end dereverberation, beamforming, and speech recognition with improved numerical stability and advanced frontend subnetworks including voice activity detection like masks. The techniques significantly stabilize the end-to-end training process. The experiments on the spatialized wsj1-2mix corpus show that the proposed system achieves about 35% WER relative reduction compared to our conventional multi-channel E2E ASR system, and also obtains decent speech dereverberation and separation performance (SDR=12.5 dB) in the reverberant multi-speaker condition while trained only with the ASR criterion.