The NTNU System at the Interspeech 2020 Non-Native Children's Speech ASR Challenge

Tien-Hong Lo; Fu-An Chao; Shi-Yan Weng; Berlin Chen

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arXiv · 2005.08433

The NTNU System at the Interspeech 2020 Non-Native Children's Speech ASR Challenge

Tien-Hong Lo·Fu-An Chao·Shi-Yan Weng·Berlin Chen

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Abstract

This paper describes the NTNU ASR system participating in the Interspeech 2020 Non-Native Children's Speech ASR Challenge supported by the SIG-CHILD group of ISCA. This ASR shared task is made much more challenging due to the coexisting diversity of non-native and children speaking characteristics. In the setting of closed-track evaluation, all participants were restricted to develop their systems merely based on the speech and text corpora provided by the organizer. To work around this under-resourced issue, we built our ASR system on top of CNN-TDNNF-based acoustic models, meanwhile harnessing the synergistic power of various data augmentation strategies, including both utterance- and word-level speed perturbation and spectrogram augmentation, alongside a simple yet effective data-cleansing approach. All variants of our ASR system employed an RNN-based language model to rescore the first-pass recognition hypotheses, which was trained solely on the text dataset released by the organizer. Our system with the best configuration came out in second place, resulting in a word error rate (WER) of 17.59 %, while those of the top-performing, second runner-up and official baseline systems are 15.67%, 18.71%, 35.09%, respectively.

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Tien-Hong Lo, Fu-An Chao, Shi-Yan Weng, Berlin Chen. 2020-05-18. The NTNU System at the Interspeech 2020 Non-Native Children's Speech ASR Challenge. https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.08433

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