arXiv subjects

Kazuki Irie

Publications and source records attributed to Kazuki Irie.

40 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2019

On the Choice of Modeling Unit for Sequence-to-Sequence Speech Recognition

In conventional speech recognition, phoneme-based models outperform grapheme-based models for non-phonetic languages such as English. The performance gap between the two typically reduces as the amount of training data is increased. In this work, we examine the impact of the choice of modeling unit for attention-based encoder-decoder models. We conduct experiments on the LibriSpeech 100hr, 460hr, and 960hr tasks, using various target units (phoneme, grapheme, and word-piece); across all tasks, we find that grapheme or word-piece models consistently outperform phoneme-based models, even though they are evaluated without a lexicon or an external language model. We also investigate model complementarity: we find that we can improve WERs by up to 9% relative by rescoring N-best lists generated from a strong word-piece based baseline with either the phoneme or the grapheme model. Rescoring an N-best list generated by the phonemic system, however, provides limited improvements. Further analysis shows that the word-piece-based models produce more diverse N-best hypotheses, and thus lower oracle WERs, than phonemic models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Language Modeling with Deep Transformers

We explore deep autoregressive Transformer models in language modeling for speech recognition. We focus on two aspects. First, we revisit Transformer model configurations specifically for language modeling. We show that well configured Transformer models outperform our baseline models based on the shallow stack of LSTM recurrent neural network layers. We carry out experiments on the open-source LibriSpeech 960hr task, for both 200K vocabulary word-level and 10K byte-pair encoding subword-level language modeling. We apply our word-level models to conventional hybrid speech recognition by lattice rescoring, and the subword-level models to attention based encoder-decoder models by shallow fusion. Second, we show that deep Transformer language models do not require positional encoding. The positional encoding is an essential augmentation for the self-attention mechanism which is invariant to sequence ordering. However, in autoregressive setup, as is the case for language modeling, the amount of information increases along the position dimension, which is a positional signal by its own. The analysis of attention weights shows that deep autoregressive self-attention models can automatically make use of such positional information. We find that removing the positional encoding even slightly improves the performance of these models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Lingvo: a Modular and Scalable Framework for Sequence-to-Sequence Modeling

Lingvo is a Tensorflow framework offering a complete solution for collaborative deep learning research, with a particular focus towards sequence-to-sequence models. Lingvo models are composed of modular building blocks that are flexible and easily extensible, and experiment configurations are centralized and highly customizable. Distributed training and quantized inference are supported directly within the framework, and it contains existing implementations of a large number of utilities, helper functions, and the newest research ideas. Lingvo has been used in collaboration by dozens of researchers in more than 20 papers over the last two years. This document outlines the underlying design of Lingvo and serves as an introduction to the various pieces of the framework, while also offering examples of advanced features that showcase the capabilities of the framework.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Improved training of end-to-end attention models for speech recognition

Sequence-to-sequence attention-based models on subword units allow simple open-vocabulary end-to-end speech recognition. In this work, we show that such models can achieve competitive results on the Switchboard 300h and LibriSpeech 1000h tasks. In particular, we report the state-of-the-art word error rates (WER) of 3.54% on the dev-clean and 3.82% on the test-clean evaluation subsets of LibriSpeech. We introduce a new pretraining scheme by starting with a high time reduction factor and lowering it during training, which is crucial both for convergence and final performance. In some experiments, we also use an auxiliary CTC loss function to help the convergence. In addition, we train long short-term memory (LSTM) language models on subword units. By shallow fusion, we report up to 27% relative improvements in WER over the attention baseline without a language model.

cs.CL↗