An Investigation of Monotonic Transducers for Large-Scale Automatic Speech Recognition

The two most popular loss functions for streaming end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) are the RNN-Transducer (RNN-T) and the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) objectives. Both perform an alignment-free training by marginalizing over all possible alignments, but use different transition rules. Between these two loss types we can classify the monotonic RNN-T (MonoRNN-T) and the recently proposed CTC-like Transducer (CTC-T), which both can be realized using the graph temporal classification-transducer (GTC-T) loss function. Monotonic transducers have a few advantages. First, RNN-T can suffer from runaway hallucination, where a model keeps emitting non-blank symbols without advancing in time, often in an infinite loop. Secondly, monotonic transducers consume exactly one model score per time step and are therefore more compatible and unifiable with traditional FST-based hybrid ASR decoders. However, the MonoRNN-T so far has been found to have worse accuracy than RNN-T. It does not have to be that way, though: By regularizing the training - via joint LAS training or parameter initialization from RNN-T - both MonoRNN-T and CTC-T perform as well - or better - than RNN-T. This is demonstrated for LibriSpeech and for a large-scale in-house data set.Comment: Submitted to Interspeech 202

Improving the Performance of Online Neural Transducer Models

Having a sequence-to-sequence model which can operate in an online fashion is important for streaming applications such as Voice Search. Neural transducer is a streaming sequence-to-sequence model, but has shown a significant degradation in performance compared to non-streaming models such as Listen, Attend and Spell (LAS). In this paper, we present various improvements to NT. Specifically, we look at increasing the window over which NT computes attention, mainly by looking backwards in time so the model still remains online. In addition, we explore initializing a NT model from a LAS-trained model so that it is guided with a better alignment. Finally, we explore including stronger language models such as using wordpiece models, and applying an external LM during the beam search. On a Voice Search task, we find with these improvements we can get NT to match the performance of LAS