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arXiv · 2210.05756

Streaming Punctuation for Long-form Dictation with Transformers

Abstract

While speech recognition Word Error Rate (WER) has reached human parity for English, long-form dictation scenarios still suffer from segmentation and punctuation problems resulting from irregular pausing patterns or slow speakers. Transformer sequence tagging models are effective at capturing long bi-directional context, which is crucial for automatic punctuation. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) production systems, however, are constrained by real-time requirements, making it hard to incorporate the right context when making punctuation decisions. In this paper, we propose a streaming approach for punctuation or re-punctuation of ASR output using dynamic decoding windows and measure its impact on punctuation and segmentation accuracy across scenarios. The new system tackles over-segmentation issues, improving segmentation F0.5-score by 13.9%. Streaming punctuation achieves an average BLEU-score improvement of 0.66 for the downstream task of Machine Translation (MT).

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BibTeXRIS

Piyush Behre, Sharman Tan, Padma Varadharajan, Shuangyu Chang. 2022-10-11. Streaming Punctuation for Long-form Dictation with Transformers. https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.05756

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