695 research outputs found
Quaternion Convolutional Neural Networks for End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition
Recently, the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) model coupled with
recurrent (RNN) or convolutional neural networks (CNN), made it easier to train
speech recognition systems in an end-to-end fashion. However in real-valued
models, time frame components such as mel-filter-bank energies and the cepstral
coefficients obtained from them, together with their first and second order
derivatives, are processed as individual elements, while a natural alternative
is to process such components as composed entities. We propose to group such
elements in the form of quaternions and to process these quaternions using the
established quaternion algebra. Quaternion numbers and quaternion neural
networks have shown their efficiency to process multidimensional inputs as
entities, to encode internal dependencies, and to solve many tasks with less
learning parameters than real-valued models. This paper proposes to integrate
multiple feature views in quaternion-valued convolutional neural network
(QCNN), to be used for sequence-to-sequence mapping with the CTC model.
Promising results are reported using simple QCNNs in phoneme recognition
experiments with the TIMIT corpus. More precisely, QCNNs obtain a lower phoneme
error rate (PER) with less learning parameters than a competing model based on
real-valued CNNs.Comment: Accepted at INTERSPEECH 201
Self-Attention Networks for Connectionist Temporal Classification in Speech Recognition
The success of self-attention in NLP has led to recent applications in
end-to-end encoder-decoder architectures for speech recognition. Separately,
connectionist temporal classification (CTC) has matured as an alignment-free,
non-autoregressive approach to sequence transduction, either by itself or in
various multitask and decoding frameworks. We propose SAN-CTC, a deep, fully
self-attentional network for CTC, and show it is tractable and competitive for
end-to-end speech recognition. SAN-CTC trains quickly and outperforms existing
CTC models and most encoder-decoder models, with character error rates (CERs)
of 4.7% in 1 day on WSJ eval92 and 2.8% in 1 week on LibriSpeech test-clean,
with a fixed architecture and one GPU. Similar improvements hold for WERs after
LM decoding. We motivate the architecture for speech, evaluate position and
downsampling approaches, and explore how label alphabets (character, phoneme,
subword) affect attention heads and performance.Comment: Accepted to ICASSP 201
Multilingual Adaptation of RNN Based ASR Systems
In this work, we focus on multilingual systems based on recurrent neural
networks (RNNs), trained using the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC)
loss function. Using a multilingual set of acoustic units poses difficulties.
To address this issue, we proposed Language Feature Vectors (LFVs) to train
language adaptive multilingual systems. Language adaptation, in contrast to
speaker adaptation, needs to be applied not only on the feature level, but also
to deeper layers of the network. In this work, we therefore extended our
previous approach by introducing a novel technique which we call "modulation".
Based on this method, we modulated the hidden layers of RNNs using LFVs. We
evaluated this approach in both full and low resource conditions, as well as
for grapheme and phone based systems. Lower error rates throughout the
different conditions could be achieved by the use of the modulation.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, to appear in 2018 IEEE International Conference on
Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2018
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