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-40.3
Paper Title Transformer in action: a comparative study of transformer-based acoustic models for large scale speech recognition applications
Authors Yongqiang Wang, Yangyang Shi, Frank Zhang, Chunyang Wu, Julian Chan, Ching-Feng Yeh, Alex Xiao, Facebook, United States
SessionSPE-40: Speech Recognition 14: Acoustic Modeling 2
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 Transformer-based acoustic models have shown promising results very recently. In this paper, we summarize the application of transformer and its streamable variant, Emformer based acoustic model for large scale speech recognition applications. We compare the transformer based acoustic models with their LSTM counterparts on industrial scale tasks. Specifically, we compare Emformer with latency-controlled BLSTM (LCBLSTM) on medium latency tasks and LSTM on low latency tasks. On a low latency voice assistant task, Emformer gets 24% to 26% relative word error rate reductions (WERRs). For medium latency scenarios, comparing with LCBLSTM with similar model size and latency, Emformer gets significant WERR across four languages in video captioning datasets with 2-3 times inference real-time factors reduction.