2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

Technical Program

Paper Detail

Paper IDSPE-52.1
Paper Title A NEURAL ACOUSTIC ECHO CANCELLER OPTIMIZED USING AN AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNIZER AND LARGE SCALE SYNTHETIC DATA
Authors Nathan Howard, Alex Park, Turaj Shabestary, Alexander Gruenstein, Rohit Prabhavalkar, Google, United States
SessionSPE-52: Speech Enhancement 8: Echo Cancellation and Other Tasks
LocationGather.Town
Session Time:Friday, 11 June, 13:00 - 13:45
Presentation Time:Friday, 11 June, 13:00 - 13:45
Presentation Poster
Topic Speech Processing: [SPE-ENHA] Speech Enhancement and Separation
IEEE Xplore Open Preview  Click here to view in IEEE Xplore
Virtual Presentation  Click here to watch in the Virtual Conference
Abstract We consider the problem of recognizing speech utterances spoken to a device which is generating a known sound waveform; for example, recognizing queries issued to a digital assistant which is generating responses to previous user inputs. Previous work has proposed building acoustic echo cancellation (AEC) models for this task that optimize speech enhancement metrics using both neural network as well as signal processing approaches. Since our goal is to recognize the input speech, we consider enhancements which improve word error rates (WERs) when the predicted speech signal is passed to an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model. First, we augment the loss function with a term that produces outputs useful to a pre-trained ASR model and show that this augmented loss function improves WER metrics. Second, we demonstrate that augmenting our training dataset of real world examples with a large synthetic dataset improves performance. Crucially, applying SpecAugment style masks to the reference channel during training aids the model in adapting from synthetic to real domains. In experimental evaluations, we find the proposed approaches improve performance, on average, by 57 % over a signal processing baseline and 45 % over the neural AEC model without the proposed changes.