A spelling correction model for end-to-end speech recognition

Jinxi Guo; Tara N. Sainath; Ron J. Weiss

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arXiv · 1902.07178

A spelling correction model for end-to-end speech recognition

Jinxi Guo·Tara N. Sainath·Ron J. Weiss

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Abstract

Attention-based sequence-to-sequence models for speech recognition jointly train an acoustic model, language model (LM), and alignment mechanism using a single neural network and require only parallel audio-text pairs. Thus, the language model component of the end-to-end model is only trained on transcribed audio-text pairs, which leads to performance degradation especially on rare words. While there have been a variety of work that look at incorporating an external LM trained on text-only data into the end-to-end framework, none of them have taken into account the characteristic error distribution made by the model. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to utilizing text-only data, by training a spelling correction (SC) model to explicitly correct those errors. On the LibriSpeech dataset, we demonstrate that the proposed model results in an 18.6% relative improvement in WER over the baseline model when directly correcting top ASR hypothesis, and a 29.0% relative improvement when further rescoring an expanded n-best list using an external LM.

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eess.AS cs.AI cs.CL cs.LG cs.SD

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BibTeX RIS

Jinxi Guo, Tara N. Sainath, Ron J. Weiss. 2019-02-19. A spelling correction model for end-to-end speech recognition. https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.07178

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