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-39.2
Paper Title AN INVESTIGATION OF USING HYBRID MODELING UNITS FOR IMPROVING END-TO-END SPEECH RECOGNITION SYSTEM
Authors Shunfei Chen, Xinhui Hu, Hithink RoyalFlush AI Research Institute, China; Sheng Li, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Japan; Xinkang Xu, Hithink RoyalFlush AI Research Institute, China
SessionSPE-39: Speech Recognition 13: Acoustic Modeling 1
LocationGather.Town
Session Time:Thursday, 10 June, 15:30 - 16:15
Presentation Time:Thursday, 10 June, 15:30 - 16:15
Presentation Poster
Topic Speech Processing: [SPE-RECO] Acoustic Modeling for Automatic Speech Recognition
IEEE Xplore Open Preview  Click here to view in IEEE Xplore
Virtual Presentation  Click here to watch in the Virtual Conference
Abstract The acoustic modeling unit is crucial for an end-to-end speech recognition system, especially for the Mandarin language. Until now, most of the studies on Mandarin speech recognition focused on individual units, and few of them paid attention to using a combination of these units. This paper uses a hybrid of the syllable, Chinese character, and subword as the modeling units for the end-to-end speech recognition system based on the CTC/attention multi-task learning. In this approach, the character-subword unit is assigned to train the transformer model in the main task learning stage. In contrast, the syllable unit is assigned to enhance the transformer's shared encoder in the auxiliary task stage with the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss function. The recognition experiments were conducted on AISHELL-1 and an open data set of 1200-hour Mandarin speech corpus collected from the OpenSLR, respectively. The experimental results demonstrated that using the syllable-char-subword hybrid modeling unit can achieve better performances than the conventional units of char-subword, and 6.6% relative CER reduction on our 1200-hour data. The substitution error also achieves a considerable reduction.