Small-footprint highway deep neural networks for speech recognition

State-of-the-art speech recognition systems typically employ neural network acoustic models. However, compared to Gaussian mixture models, deep neural network (DNN) based acoustic models often have many more model parameters, making it challenging for them to be deployed on resource-constrained platforms, such as mobile devices. In this paper, we study the application of the recently proposed highway deep neural network (HDNN) for training small-footprint acoustic models. HDNNs are a depth-gated feedforward neural network, which include two types of gate functions to facilitate the information flow through different layers. Our study demonstrates that HDNNs are more compact than regular DNNs for acoustic modeling, i.e., they can achieve comparable recognition accuracy with many fewer model parameters. Furthermore, HDNNs are more controllable than DNNs: the gate functions of an HDNN can control the behavior of the whole network using a very small number of model parameters. Finally, we show that HDNNs are more adaptable than DNNs. For example, simply updating the gate functions using adaptation data can result in considerable gains in accuracy. We demonstrate these aspects by experiments using the publicly available AMI corpus, which has around 80 hours of training data.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures. Accepted to IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing, 2017. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1608.00892, arXiv:1607.0196

Small-footprint Deep Neural Networks with Highway Connections for Speech Recognition

For speech recognition, deep neural networks (DNNs) have significantly improved the recognition accuracy in most of benchmark datasets and application domains. However, compared to the conventional Gaussian mixture models, DNN-based acoustic models usually have much larger number of model parameters, making it challenging for their applications in resource constrained platforms, e.g., mobile devices. In this paper, we study the application of the recently proposed highway network to train small-footprint DNNs, which are {\it thinner} and {\it deeper}, and have significantly smaller number of model parameters compared to conventional DNNs. We investigated this approach on the AMI meeting speech transcription corpus which has around 70 hours of audio data. The highway neural networks constantly outperformed their plain DNN counterparts, and the number of model parameters can be reduced significantly without sacrificing the recognition accuracy.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, fixed typo, accepted by Interspeech 201