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arXiv · 1810.03459

Multilingual sequence-to-sequence speech recognition: architecture, transfer learning, and language modeling

Abstract

Sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) approach for low-resource ASR is a relatively new direction in speech research. The approach benefits by performing model training without using lexicon and alignments. However, this poses a new problem of requiring more data compared to conventional DNN-HMM systems. In this work, we attempt to use data from 10 BABEL languages to build a multi-lingual seq2seq model as a prior model, and then port them towards 4 other BABEL languages using transfer learning approach. We also explore different architectures for improving the prior multilingual seq2seq model. The paper also discusses the effect of integrating a recurrent neural network language model (RNNLM) with a seq2seq model during decoding. Experimental results show that the transfer learning approach from the multilingual model shows substantial gains over monolingual models across all 4 BABEL languages. Incorporating an RNNLM also brings significant improvements in terms of %WER, and achieves recognition performance comparable to the models trained with twice more training data.

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Jaejin Cho, Murali Karthick Baskar, Ruizhi Li, Matthew Wiesner, Sri Harish Mallidi, Nelson Yalta, Martin Karafiat, Shinji Watanabe, Takaaki Hori. 2018-10-04. Multilingual sequence-to-sequence speech recognition: architecture, transfer learning, and language modeling. https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.03459

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