Attention-based end-to-end speech recognition on voice search

Changhao Shan, Junbo Zhang, Yujun Wang, Lei Xie

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

61 Scopus citations

Abstract

Recently, there has been a growing interest in end-to-end speech recognition that directly transcribes speech to text without any predefined alignments. In this paper, we explore the use of attention-based encoder-decoder model for Mandarin speech recognition on a voice search task. Previous attempts have shown that applying attention-based encoder-decoder to Mandarin speech recognition was quite difficult due to the logographic orthography of Mandarin, the large vocabulary and the conditional dependency of the attention model. In this paper, we use character embedding to deal with the large vocabulary. Several tricks are used for effective model training, including L2 regularization, Gaussian weight noise and frame skipping. We compare two attention mechanisms and use attention smoothing to cover long context in the attention model. Taken together, these tricks allow us to finally achieve a character error rate (CER) of 3.58% and a sentence error rate (SER) of 7.43% on the MiTV voice search dataset. While together with a trigram language model, CER and SER reach 2.81% and 5.77%, respectively.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2018 - Proceedings
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages4764-4768
Number of pages5
ISBN (Print)9781538646588
DOIs
StatePublished - 10 Sep 2018
Event2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2018 - Calgary, Canada
Duration: 15 Apr 201820 Apr 2018

Publication series

NameICASSP, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - Proceedings
Volume2018-April
ISSN (Print)1520-6149

Conference

Conference2018 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2018
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityCalgary
Period15/04/1820/04/18

Keywords

  • Attention model
  • Automatic speech recognition
  • End-to-end speech recognition
  • Voice search

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