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arXiv · 2409.08797

Exploring SSL Discrete Speech Features for Zipformer-based Contextual ASR

Mingyu Cui·Yifan Yang·Jiajun Deng·Jiawen Kang·Shujie Hu·Tianzi Wang·Zhaoqing Li·Shiliang Zhang·Xie Chen·Xunying Liu
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Abstract

Self-supervised learning (SSL) based discrete speech representations are highly compact and domain adaptable. In this paper, SSL discrete speech features extracted from WavLM models are used as additional cross-utterance acoustic context features in Zipformer-Transducer ASR systems. The efficacy of replacing Fbank features with discrete token features for modelling either cross-utterance contexts (from preceding and future segments), or current utterance's internal contexts alone, or both at the same time, are demonstrated thoroughly on the Gigaspeech 1000-hr corpus. The best Zipformer-Transducer system using discrete tokens based cross-utterance context features outperforms the baseline using utterance internal context only with statistically significant word error rate (WER) reductions of 0.32% to 0.41% absolute (2.78% to 3.54% relative) on the dev and test data. The lowest published WER of 11.15% and 11.14% were obtained on the dev and test sets. Our work is open-source and publicly available at https://github.com/open-creator/icefall/tree/master/egs/gigaspeech/Context\_ASR.

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Mingyu Cui, Yifan Yang, Jiajun Deng, Jiawen Kang, Shujie Hu, Tianzi Wang, Zhaoqing Li, Shiliang Zhang, Xie Chen, Xunying Liu. 2025-06-10. Exploring SSL Discrete Speech Features for Zipformer-based Contextual ASR. https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08797

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