145 research outputs found
The Microsoft 2017 Conversational Speech Recognition System
We describe the 2017 version of Microsoft's conversational speech recognition
system, in which we update our 2016 system with recent developments in
neural-network-based acoustic and language modeling to further advance the
state of the art on the Switchboard speech recognition task. The system adds a
CNN-BLSTM acoustic model to the set of model architectures we combined
previously, and includes character-based and dialog session aware LSTM language
models in rescoring. For system combination we adopt a two-stage approach,
whereby subsets of acoustic models are first combined at the senone/frame
level, followed by a word-level voting via confusion networks. We also added a
confusion network rescoring step after system combination. The resulting system
yields a 5.1\% word error rate on the 2000 Switchboard evaluation set
Web-Scale Training for Face Identification
Scaling machine learning methods to very large datasets has attracted
considerable attention in recent years, thanks to easy access to ubiquitous
sensing and data from the web. We study face recognition and show that three
distinct properties have surprising effects on the transferability of deep
convolutional networks (CNN): (1) The bottleneck of the network serves as an
important transfer learning regularizer, and (2) in contrast to the common
wisdom, performance saturation may exist in CNN's (as the number of training
samples grows); we propose a solution for alleviating this by replacing the
naive random subsampling of the training set with a bootstrapping process.
Moreover, (3) we find a link between the representation norm and the ability to
discriminate in a target domain, which sheds lights on how such networks
represent faces. Based on these discoveries, we are able to improve face
recognition accuracy on the widely used LFW benchmark, both in the verification
(1:1) and identification (1:N) protocols, and directly compare, for the first
time, with the state of the art Commercially-Off-The-Shelf system and show a
sizable leap in performance
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