2,772 research outputs found
Optimizing expected word error rate via sampling for speech recognition
State-level minimum Bayes risk (sMBR) training has become the de facto
standard for sequence-level training of speech recognition acoustic models. It
has an elegant formulation using the expectation semiring, and gives large
improvements in word error rate (WER) over models trained solely using
cross-entropy (CE) or connectionist temporal classification (CTC). sMBR
training optimizes the expected number of frames at which the reference and
hypothesized acoustic states differ. It may be preferable to optimize the
expected WER, but WER does not interact well with the expectation semiring, and
previous approaches based on computing expected WER exactly involve expanding
the lattices used during training. In this paper we show how to perform
optimization of the expected WER by sampling paths from the lattices used
during conventional sMBR training. The gradient of the expected WER is itself
an expectation, and so may be approximated using Monte Carlo sampling. We show
experimentally that optimizing WER during acoustic model training gives 5%
relative improvement in WER over a well-tuned sMBR baseline on a 2-channel
query recognition task (Google Home)
RWTH ASR Systems for LibriSpeech: Hybrid vs Attention -- w/o Data Augmentation
We present state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems
employing a standard hybrid DNN/HMM architecture compared to an attention-based
encoder-decoder design for the LibriSpeech task. Detailed descriptions of the
system development, including model design, pretraining schemes, training
schedules, and optimization approaches are provided for both system
architectures. Both hybrid DNN/HMM and attention-based systems employ
bi-directional LSTMs for acoustic modeling/encoding. For language modeling, we
employ both LSTM and Transformer based architectures. All our systems are built
using RWTHs open-source toolkits RASR and RETURNN. To the best knowledge of the
authors, the results obtained when training on the full LibriSpeech training
set, are the best published currently, both for the hybrid DNN/HMM and the
attention-based systems. Our single hybrid system even outperforms previous
results obtained from combining eight single systems. Our comparison shows that
on the LibriSpeech 960h task, the hybrid DNN/HMM system outperforms the
attention-based system by 15% relative on the clean and 40% relative on the
other test sets in terms of word error rate. Moreover, experiments on a reduced
100h-subset of the LibriSpeech training corpus even show a more pronounced
margin between the hybrid DNN/HMM and attention-based architectures.Comment: Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 201
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