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arXiv · 2309.12963

Massive End-to-end Models for Short Search Queries

Weiran Wang·Rohit Prabhavalkar·Dongseong Hwang·Qiujia Li·Khe Chai Sim·Bo Li·James Qin·Xingyu Cai·Adam Stooke·Zhong Meng·CJ Zheng·Yanzhang He·Tara Sainath·Pedro Moreno Mengibar
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Abstract

In this work, we investigate two popular end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, namely Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) and RNN-Transducer (RNN-T), for offline recognition of voice search queries, with up to 2B model parameters. The encoders of our models use the neural architecture of Google's universal speech model (USM), with additional funnel pooling layers to significantly reduce the frame rate and speed up training and inference. We perform extensive studies on vocabulary size, time reduction strategy, and its generalization performance on long-form test sets. Despite the speculation that, as the model size increases, CTC can be as good as RNN-T which builds label dependency into the prediction, we observe that a 900M RNN-T clearly outperforms a 1.8B CTC and is more tolerant to severe time reduction, although the WER gap can be largely removed by LM shallow fusion.

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Weiran Wang, Rohit Prabhavalkar, Dongseong Hwang, Qiujia Li, Khe Chai Sim, Bo Li, James Qin, Xingyu Cai, Adam Stooke, Zhong Meng, CJ Zheng, Yanzhang He, Tara Sainath, Pedro Moreno Mengibar. 2023-09-22. Massive End-to-end Models for Short Search Queries. https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.12963

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