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arXiv · 2206.02093

LAE: Language-Aware Encoder for Monolingual and Multilingual ASR

Jinchuan Tian·Jianwei Yu·Chunlei Zhang·Chao Weng·Yuexian Zou·Dong Yu
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Abstract

Despite the rapid progress in automatic speech recognition (ASR) research, recognizing multilingual speech using a unified ASR system remains highly challenging. Previous works on multilingual speech recognition mainly focus on two directions: recognizing multiple monolingual speech or recognizing code-switched speech that uses different languages interchangeably within a single utterance. However, a pragmatic multilingual recognizer is expected to be compatible with both directions. In this work, a novel language-aware encoder (LAE) architecture is proposed to handle both situations by disentangling language-specific information and generating frame-level language-aware representations during encoding. In the LAE, the primary encoding is implemented by the shared block while the language-specific blocks are used to extract specific representations for each language. To learn language-specific information discriminatively, a language-aware training method is proposed to optimize the language-specific blocks in LAE. Experiments conducted on Mandarin-English code-switched speech suggest that the proposed LAE is capable of discriminating different languages in frame-level and shows superior performance on both monolingual and multilingual ASR tasks. With either a real-recorded or simulated code-switched dataset, the proposed LAE achieves statistically significant improvements on both CTC and neural transducer systems. Code is released

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Jinchuan Tian, Jianwei Yu, Chunlei Zhang, Chao Weng, Yuexian Zou, Dong Yu. 2022-06-05. LAE: Language-Aware Encoder for Monolingual and Multilingual ASR. https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.02093

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