676 research outputs found
Improved training of end-to-end attention models for speech recognition
Sequence-to-sequence attention-based models on subword units allow simple
open-vocabulary end-to-end speech recognition. In this work, we show that such
models can achieve competitive results on the Switchboard 300h and LibriSpeech
1000h tasks. In particular, we report the state-of-the-art word error rates
(WER) of 3.54% on the dev-clean and 3.82% on the test-clean evaluation subsets
of LibriSpeech. We introduce a new pretraining scheme by starting with a high
time reduction factor and lowering it during training, which is crucial both
for convergence and final performance. In some experiments, we also use an
auxiliary CTC loss function to help the convergence. In addition, we train long
short-term memory (LSTM) language models on subword units. By shallow fusion,
we report up to 27% relative improvements in WER over the attention baseline
without a language model.Comment: submitted to Interspeech 201
RETURNN as a Generic Flexible Neural Toolkit with Application to Translation and Speech Recognition
We compare the fast training and decoding speed of RETURNN of attention
models for translation, due to fast CUDA LSTM kernels, and a fast pure
TensorFlow beam search decoder. We show that a layer-wise pretraining scheme
for recurrent attention models gives over 1% BLEU improvement absolute and it
allows to train deeper recurrent encoder networks. Promising preliminary
results on max. expected BLEU training are presented. We are able to train
state-of-the-art models for translation and end-to-end models for speech
recognition and show results on WMT 2017 and Switchboard. The flexibility of
RETURNN allows a fast research feedback loop to experiment with alternative
architectures, and its generality allows to use it on a wide range of
applications.Comment: accepted as demo paper on ACL 201
Advances in All-Neural Speech Recognition
This paper advances the design of CTC-based all-neural (or end-to-end) speech
recognizers. We propose a novel symbol inventory, and a novel iterated-CTC
method in which a second system is used to transform a noisy initial output
into a cleaner version. We present a number of stabilization and initialization
methods we have found useful in training these networks. We evaluate our system
on the commonly used NIST 2000 conversational telephony test set, and
significantly exceed the previously published performance of similar systems,
both with and without the use of an external language model and decoding
technology
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