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Register a new userLearning Fast Adaptation on Cross-Accented Speech Recognition
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Local dialects influence people to pronounce words of the same language differently from each other. The great variability and complex characteristics of accents creates a major challenge for training a robust and accent-agnostic automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. In this paper, we introduce a cross-accented English speech recognition task as a benchmark for measuring the ability of the model to adapt to unseen accents using the existing CommonVoice corpus. We also propose an accent-agnostic approach that extends the model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML) algorithm for fast adaptation to unseen accents. Our approach significantly outperforms joint training in both zero-shot, few-shot, and all-shot in the mixed-region and cross-region settings in terms of word error rate.
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Recently, self-supervised pre-training has gained success in automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, considering the difference between speech accents in real scenarios, how to identify accents and use accent features to improve ASR is still challenging. In this paper, we employ the self-supervised pre-training method for both accent identification and accented speech recognition tasks. For the former task, a standard deviation constraint loss (SDC-loss) based end-to-end (E2E) architecture is proposed to identify accents under the same language. As for accented speech recognition task, we design an accent-dependent ASR system, which can utilize additional accent input features. Furthermore, we propose a frame-level accent feature, which is extracted based on the proposed accent identification model and can be dynamically adjusted. We pre-train our models using 960 hours unlabeled LibriSpeech dataset and fine-tune them on AESRC2020 speech dataset. The experimental results show that our proposed accent-dependent ASR system is significantly ahead of the AESRC2020 baseline and achieves $6.5%$ relative word error rate (WER) reduction compared with our accent-independent ASR system.
This paper is focused on the finetuning of acoustic models for speaker adaptation goals on a given gender. We pretrained the Transformer baseline model on Librispeech-960 and conduct experiments with finetuning on the gender-specific test subsets and. In general, we do not obtain essential WER reduction by finetuning techniques by this approach. We achieved up to ~5% lower word error rate on the male subset and 3% on the female subset if the layers in the encoder and decoder are not frozen, but the tuning is started from the last checkpoints. Moreover, we adapted our base model on the full L2 Arctic dataset of accented speech and fine-tuned it for particular speakers and male and female genders separately. The models trained on the gender subsets obtained 1-2% higher accuracy when compared to the model tuned on the whole L2 Arctic dataset. Finally, we tested the concatenation of the pretrained x-vector voice embeddings and embeddings from a conventional encoder, but its gain in accuracy is not significant.
While improvements have been made in automatic speech recognition performance over the last several years, machines continue to have significantly lower performance on accented speech than humans. In addition, the most significant improvements on accented speech primarily arise by overwhelming the problem with hundreds or even thousands of hours of data. Humans typically require much less data to adapt to a new accent. This paper explores methods that are inspired by human perception to evaluate possible performance improvements for recognition of accented speech, with a specific focus on recognizing speech with a novel accent relative to that of the training data. Our experiments are run on small, accessible datasets that are available to the research community. We explore four methodologies: pre-exposure to multiple accents, grapheme and phoneme-based pronunciations, dropout (to improve generalization to a novel accent), and the identification of the layers in the neural network that can specifically be associated with accent modeling. Our results indicate that methods based on human perception are promising in reducing WER and understanding how accented speech is modeled in neural networks for novel accents.
We introduce the problem of adapting a black-box, cloud-based ASR system to speech from a target accent. While leading online ASR services obtain impressive performance on main-stream accents, they perform poorly on sub-populations - we observed that the word error rate (WER) achieved by Googles ASR API on Indian accents is almost twice the WER on US accents. Existing adaptation methods either require access to model parameters or overlay an error-correcting module on output transcripts. We highlight the need for correlating outputs with the original speech to fix accent errors. Accordingly, we propose a novel coupling of an open-source accent-tuned local model with the black-box service where the output from the service guides frame-level inference in the local model. Our fine-grained merging algorithm is better at fixing accent errors than existing word-level combination strategies. Experiments on Indian and Australian accents with three leading ASR models as service, show that we achieve as much as 28% relative reduction in WER over both the local and service models.
Conventional deep neural network (DNN)-based speech enhancement (SE) approaches aim to minimize the mean square error (MSE) between enhanced speech and clean reference. The MSE-optimized model may not directly improve the performance of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. If the target is to minimize the recognition error, the recognition results should be used to design the objective function for optimizing the SE model. However, the structure of an ASR system, which consists of multiple units, such as acoustic and language models, is usually complex and not differentiable. In this study, we proposed to adopt the reinforcement learning algorithm to optimize the SE model based on the recognition results. We evaluated the propsoed SE system on the Mandarin Chinese broadcast news corpus (MATBN). Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can effectively improve the ASR results with a notable 12.40% and 19.23% error rate reductions for signal to noise ratio at 0 dB and 5 dB conditions, respectively.
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