Confidence-based Ensembles of End-to-End Speech Recognition Models

The number of end-to-end speech recognition models grows every year. These models are often adapted to new domains or languages resulting in a proliferation of expert systems that achieve great results on target data, while generally showing inferior performance outside of their domain of expertise. We explore combination of such experts via confidence-based ensembles: ensembles of models where only the output of the most-confident model is used. We assume that models' target data is not available except for a small validation set. We demonstrate effectiveness of our approach with two applications. First, we show that a confidence-based ensemble of 5 monolingual models outperforms a system where model selection is performed via a dedicated language identification block. Second, we demonstrate that it is possible to combine base and adapted models to achieve strong results on both original and target data. We validate all our results on multiple datasets and model architectures.Comment: To appear in Proc. INTERSPEECH 2023, August 20-24, 2023, Dublin, Irelan

Damage Control During Domain Adaptation for Transducer Based Automatic Speech Recognition

Automatic speech recognition models are often adapted to improve their accuracy in a new domain. A potential drawback of model adaptation to new domains is catastrophic forgetting, where the Word Error Rate on the original domain is significantly degraded. This paper addresses the situation when we want to simultaneously adapt automatic speech recognition models to a new domain and limit the degradation of accuracy on the original domain without access to the original training dataset. We propose several techniques such as a limited training strategy and regularized adapter modules for the Transducer encoder, prediction, and joiner network. We apply these methods to the Google Speech Commands and to the UK and Ireland English Dialect speech data set and obtain strong results on the new target domain while limiting the degradation on the original domain.Comment: To appear in Proc. SLT 2022, Jan 09-12, 2023, Doha, Qata

Factors complex mechanism of social protection

У статті проаналізовано чинники розвитку комплексного механізму соціального захисту населення. Обгрунтовано, що при узгодженості інтересів суб’єктів і об’єктів соціального захисту по вертикалі і горизонталі їх взаємодія дозволяє ефективно розвиватися в сучасних економічних умовах; концептуальні основи ефективного розвитку соціального захисту припускають наявність чіткої регламентації компетенцій за рівнями соціально­економічної системи суспільства; розподіл компетенцій за рівнями соціально­економічної системи суспільства базується на об’єктивному аналізі видів витрат суспільства; організаційно­правові основи підвищення ефективності даного механізму структурно і змістовно визначаються соціально­економічними передумовами.The article analyzes the factors in the development of a comprehensive mechanism of social protection of the population. It is proved that when the consistency of the interests of the subjects and objects of social protection vertical and horizontal interaction allows to develop effectively in the current economic conditions, a conceptual framework for efficient development of social protection require a clear regulation of the competence levels of the socio­economic system of the company; the distribution of competencies across levels of socio­economic system of a society is based on an objective analysis of the expenses of the company; the legal basis for the improvement of the effectiveness of this mechanism is structurally and content are determined by the socio­economic conditions. The existing system of social protection of the population is not effective enough and leads to bankruptcy of the state, whose financial capabilities do not meet social obligations. It can be stated that today the full implementation of the Constitution of Ukraine, in which Ukraine is defined as a social state, is not fully implemented, as a significant decrease in the standard of living of the bulk of the population.The reform of social protection is defined in the Strategy for Sustainable Development - 2020 as one of the top priorities. It is indisputable that there is a need to improve the mechanisms of social protection for all groups of the population. Determination of potential main directions, structure and forms of modernization of these mechanisms has a very relevant theoretical and practical significance for the modern stage of development of society

Text-only domain adaptation for end-to-end ASR using integrated text-to-mel-spectrogram generator

We propose an end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system that can be trained on transcribed speech data, text-only data, or a mixture of both. The proposed model uses an integrated auxiliary block for text-based training. This block combines a non-autoregressive multi-speaker text-to-mel-spectrogram generator with a GAN-based enhancer to improve the spectrogram quality. The proposed system can generate a mel-spectrogram dynamically during training. It can be used to adapt the ASR model to a new domain by using text-only data from this domain. We demonstrate that the proposed training method significantly improves ASR accuracy compared to the system trained on transcribed speech only. It also surpasses cascade TTS systems with the vocoder in the adaptation quality and training speed.Comment: Accepted to INTERSPEECH 202

Державне управління у сфері соціального захисту населення: теоретичні аспекти

The article presents the analysis of the theoretical approaches to the interpretation ofthe social protection system, examines subjects and objects of social protection, and definesthe specific features of public administration in the field of social protection. A newversion of the definition of “social protection” has been offered. It is concluded that thedevelopment of public administration in the field of social protection in Ukraine requiresthe use of modern methodology of problem solving. In connection with this, there is aproblem of adequate use of general and specific approaches and methods of public administration,in particular, public policy analysis, system and situation analysis, programbasedapproaches, and methods of expert opinion. Social protection of the population becomes more relevant at a time when society, the country are experiencing difficult periods, when sharply exacerbated social problems. Moreover, their decision depends, first of all, on the possibilities of the material (financial) base of social work, as well as on the essence and content of state social policy.The system of social protection is a sphere of vital interests of the population, the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of which indicate the level of social, economic, legal and cultural development of the state and society. The peculiarities of organization of the national system of social protection largely determine the order in the country, the degree of consent in society, as well as the stability and dynamics of economic and social development. This determines the relevance of the chosen problem..У статті здійснено аналіз теоретичних підходів до інтерпретації системи соціаль-ного захисту населення, розглянуто суб’єкти та об’єкти соціального захисту, визна-чено специфіку державного управління у сфері соціального захисту. Запропонованонову редакцію визначення поняття «соціальний захист населення». Зроблено ви-сновок про те, що розвиток державного управління соціальним захистом населенняв Україні вимагає застосування сучасної методології вирішення проблем. У цьомузв’язку виникають проблеми адекватного застосування загальних та спеціальнихпідходів і методів державного управління, зокрема аналізу державної політики, сис-темного та ситуаційного аналізу, програмно-цільового підходу, методів експертнихоцінок