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Endpoint (EP) detection is a key component of far-field speech recognition systems that assist the user through voice commands. The endpoint detector has to trade-off between accuracy and latency, since waiting longer reduces the cases of users being cut-off early. We propose a novel two-pass solution for endpointing, where the utterance endpoint detected from a first pass endpointer is verified by a 2nd-pass model termed EP Arbitrator. Our method improves the trade-off between early cut-offs and latency over a baseline endpointer, as tested on datasets including voice-assistant transactional queries, conversational speech, and the public SLURP corpus. We demonstrate that our method shows improvements regardless of the first-pass EP model used., Comment: ASRU 2023

We propose a novel approach for ASR N-best hypothesis rescoring with graph-based label propagation by leveraging cross-utterance acoustic similarity. In contrast to conventional neural language model (LM) based ASR rescoring/reranking models, our approach focuses on acoustic information and conducts the rescoring collaboratively among utterances, instead of individually. Experiments on the VCTK dataset demonstrate that our approach consistently improves ASR performance, as well as fairness across speaker groups with different accents. Our approach provides a low-cost solution for mitigating the majoritarian bias of ASR systems, without the need to train new domain- or accent-specific models., Comment: To appear in IEEE ICASSP 2023

To achieve robust far-field automatic speech recognition (ASR), existing techniques typically employ an acoustic front end (AFE) cascaded with a neural transducer (NT) ASR model. The AFE output, however, could be unreliable, as the beamforming output in AFE is steered to a wrong direction. A promising way to address this issue is to exploit the microphone signals before the beamforming stage and after the acoustic echo cancellation (post-AEC) in AFE. We argue that both, post-AEC and AFE outputs, are complementary and it is possible to leverage the redundancy between these signals to compensate for potential AFE processing errors. We present two fusion networks to explore this redundancy and aggregate these multi-channel (MC) signals: (1) Frequency-LSTM based, and (2) Convolutional Neural Network based fusion networks. We augment the MC fusion networks to a conformer transducer model and train it in an end-to-end fashion. Our experimental results on commercial virtual assistant tasks demonstrate that using the AFE output and two post-AEC signals with fusion networks offers up to 25.9% word error rate (WER) relative improvement over the model using the AFE output only, at the cost of <= 2% parameter increase.

Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC) is a representation learning method that maximizes the mutual information between intermediate latent representations and the output of a given model. It can be used to effectively initialize the encoder of an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) model. We present a novel modification of CPC called Guided Contrastive Predictive Coding (GCPC). Our proposed method maximizes the mutual information between representations from a prior-knowledge model and the output of the model being pre-trained, allowing prior knowledge injection during pre-training. We validate our method on 3 ASR tasks: German, French and English. Our method outperforms CPC pre-training on all three datasets, reducing the Word Error Rate (WER) by 4.44%, 6.55% and 15.43% relative on the German, French and English (Librispeech) tasks respectively, compared to training from scratch, while CPC pre-training only brings 2.96%, 1.01% and 14.39% relative WER reduction respectively., Comment: To appear in SLT 2022

We present an approach to reduce the performance disparity between geographic regions without degrading performance on the overall user population for ASR. A popular approach is to fine-tune the model with data from regions where the ASR model has a higher word error rate (WER). However, when the ASR model is adapted to get better performance on these high-WER regions, its parameters wander from the previous optimal values, which can lead to worse performance in other regions. In our proposed method, we utilize the elastic weight consolidation (EWC) regularization loss to identify directions in parameters space along which the ASR weights can vary to improve for high-error regions, while still maintaining performance on the speaker population overall. Our results demonstrate that EWC can reduce the word error rate (WER) in the region with highest WER by 3.2% relative while reducing the overall WER by 1.3% relative. We also evaluate the role of language and acoustic models in ASR fairness and propose a clustering algorithm to identify WER disparities based on geographic region., Comment: Accepted for publication at Interspeech 2022

While end-to-end models have shown great success on the Automatic Speech Recognition task, performance degrades severely when target sentences are long-form. The previous proposed methods, (partial) overlapping inference are shown to be effective on long-form decoding. For both methods, word error rate (WER) decreases monotonically when overlapping percentage decreases. Setting aside computational cost, the setup with 50% overlapping during inference can achieve the best performance. However, a lower overlapping percentage has an advantage of fast inference speed. In this paper, we first conduct comprehensive experiments comparing overlapping inference and partial overlapping inference with various configurations. We then propose Voice-Activity-Detection Overlapping Inference to provide a trade-off between WER and computation cost. Results show that the proposed method can achieve a 20% relative computation cost reduction on Librispeech and Microsoft Speech Language Translation long-form corpus while maintaining the WER performance when comparing to the best performing overlapping inference algorithm. We also propose Soft-Match to compensate for similar words mis-aligned problem.

End-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) models have recently demonstrated superior performance over the traditional hybrid ASR models. Training an E2E ASR model requires a large amount of data which is not only expensive but may also raise dependency on production data. At the same time, synthetic speech generated by the state-of-the-art text-to-speech (TTS) engines has advanced to near-human naturalness. In this work, we propose to utilize synthetic speech for ASR training (SynthASR) in applications where data is sparse or hard to get for ASR model training. In addition, we apply continual learning with a novel multi-stage training strategy to address catastrophic forgetting, achieved by a mix of weighted multi-style training, data augmentation, encoder freezing, and parameter regularization. In our experiments conducted on in-house datasets for a new application of recognizing medication names, training ASR RNN-T models with synthetic audio via the proposed multi-stage training improved the recognition performance on new application by more than 65% relative, without degradation on existing general applications. Our observations show that SynthASR holds great promise in training the state-of-the-art large-scale E2E ASR models for new applications while reducing the costs and dependency on production data., Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 2021

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) models are typically designed to operate on a single input data type, e.g. a single or multi-channel audio streamed from a device. This design decision assumes the primary input data source does not change and if an additional (auxiliary) data source is occasionally available, it cannot be used. An ASR model that operates on both primary and auxiliary data can achieve better accuracy compared to a primary-only solution; and a model that can serve both primary-only (PO) and primary-plus-auxiliary (PPA) modes is highly desirable. In this work, we propose a unified ASR model that can serve both modes. We demonstrate its efficacy in a realistic scenario where a set of devices typically stream a single primary audio channel, and two additional auxiliary channels only when upload bandwidth allows it. The architecture enables a unique methodology that uses both types of input audio during training time. Our proposed approach achieves up to 12.5% relative word-error-rate reduction (WERR) compared to a PO baseline, and up to 16.0% relative WERR in low-SNR conditions. The unique training methodology achieves up to 2.5% relative WERR compared to a PPA baseline.

Attention-based beamformers have recently been shown to be effective for multi-channel speech recognition. However, they are less capable at capturing local information. In this work, we propose a 2D Conv-Attention module which combines convolution neural networks with attention for beamforming. We apply self- and cross-attention to explicitly model the correlations within and between the input channels. The end-to-end 2D Conv-Attention model is compared with a multi-head self-attention and superdirective-based neural beamformers. We train and evaluate on an in-house multi-channel dataset. The results show a relative improvement of 3.8% in WER by the proposed model over the baseline neural beamformer.

Wav2vec-C introduces a novel representation learning technique combining elements from wav2vec 2.0 and VQ-VAE. Our model learns to reproduce quantized representations from partially masked speech encoding using a contrastive loss in a way similar to Wav2vec 2.0. However, the quantization process is regularized by an additional consistency network that learns to reconstruct the input features to the wav2vec 2.0 network from the quantized representations in a way similar to a VQ-VAE model. The proposed self-supervised model is trained on 10k hours of unlabeled data and subsequently used as the speech encoder in a RNN-T ASR model and fine-tuned with 1k hours of labeled data. This work is one of only a few studies of self-supervised learning on speech tasks with a large volume of real far-field labeled data. The Wav2vec-C encoded representations achieves, on average, twice the error reduction over baseline and a higher codebook utilization in comparison to wav2vec 2.0, Comment: To appear in Interspeech 2021

Accents mismatching is a critical problem for end-to-end ASR. This paper aims to address this problem by building an accent-robust RNN-T system with domain adversarial training (DAT). We unveil the magic behind DAT and provide, for the first time, a theoretical guarantee that DAT learns accent-invariant representations. We also prove that performing the gradient reversal in DAT is equivalent to minimizing the Jensen-Shannon divergence between domain output distributions. Motivated by the proof of equivalence, we introduce reDAT, a novel technique based on DAT, which relabels data using either unsupervised clustering or soft labels. Experiments on 23K hours of multi-accent data show that DAT achieves competitive results over accent-specific baselines on both native and non-native English accents but up to 13% relative WER reduction on unseen accents; our reDAT yields further improvements over DAT by 3% and 8% relatively on non-native accents of American and British English., Comment: accepted in ICASSP 2021; final camera-ready version

In this work, we propose a novel and efficient minimum word error rate (MWER) training method for RNN-Transducer (RNN-T). Unlike previous work on this topic, which performs on-the-fly limited-size beam-search decoding and generates alignment scores for expected edit-distance computation, in our proposed method, we re-calculate and sum scores of all the possible alignments for each hypothesis in N-best lists. The hypothesis probability scores and back-propagated gradients are calculated efficiently using the forward-backward algorithm. Moreover, the proposed method allows us to decouple the decoding and training processes, and thus we can perform offline parallel-decoding and MWER training for each subset iteratively. Experimental results show that this proposed semi-on-the-fly method can speed up the on-the-fly method by 6 times and result in a similar WER improvement (3.6%) over a baseline RNN-T model. The proposed MWER training can also effectively reduce high-deletion errors (9.2% WER-reduction) introduced by RNN-T models when EOS is added for endpointer. Further improvement can be achieved if we use a proposed RNN-T rescoring method to re-rank hypotheses and use external RNN-LM to perform additional rescoring. The best system achieves a 5% relative improvement on an English test-set of real far-field recordings and a 11.6% WER reduction on music-domain utterances., Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 2020

In this paper, we propose a streaming model to distinguish voice queries intended for a smart-home device from background speech. The proposed model consists of multiple CNN layers with residual connections, followed by a stacked LSTM architecture. The streaming capability is achieved by using unidirectional LSTM layers and a causal mean aggregation layer to form the final utterance-level prediction up to the current frame. In order to avoid redundant computation during online streaming inference, we use a caching mechanism for every convolution operation. Experimental results on a device-directed vs. non device-directed task show that the proposed model yields an equal error rate reduction of 41% compared to our previous best model on this task. Furthermore, we show that the proposed model is able to accurately predict earlier in time compared to the attention-based models.

Multilingual ASR technology simplifies model training and deployment, but its accuracy is known to depend on the availability of language information at runtime. Since language identity is seldom known beforehand in real-world scenarios, it must be inferred on-the-fly with minimum latency. Furthermore, in voice-activated smart assistant systems, language identity is also required for downstream processing of ASR output. In this paper, we introduce streaming, end-to-end, bilingual systems that perform both ASR and language identification (LID) using the recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T) architecture. On the input side, embeddings from pretrained acoustic-only LID classifiers are used to guide RNN-T training and inference, while on the output side, language targets are jointly modeled with ASR targets. The proposed method is applied to two language pairs: English-Spanish as spoken in the United States, and English-Hindi as spoken in India. Experiments show that for English-Spanish, the bilingual joint ASR-LID architecture matches monolingual ASR and acoustic-only LID accuracies. For the more challenging (owing to within-utterance code switching) case of English-Hindi, English ASR and LID metrics show degradation. Overall, in scenarios where users switch dynamically between languages, the proposed architecture offers a promising simplification over running multiple monolingual ASR models and an LID classifier in parallel.

Acoustic models in real-time speech recognition systems typically stack multiple unidirectional LSTM layers to process the acoustic frames over time. Performance improvements over vanilla LSTM architectures have been reported by prepending a stack of frequency-LSTM (FLSTM) layers to the time LSTM. These FLSTM layers can learn a more robust input feature to the time LSTM layers by modeling time-frequency correlations in the acoustic input signals. A drawback of FLSTM based architectures however is that they operate at a predefined, and tuned, window size and stride, referred to as 'view' in this paper. We present a simple and efficient modification by combining the outputs of multiple FLSTM stacks with different views, into a dimensionality reduced feature representation. The proposed multi-view FLSTM architecture allows to model a wider range of time-frequency correlations compared to an FLSTM model with single view. When trained on 50K hours of English far-field speech data with CTC loss followed by sMBR sequence training, we show that the multi-view FLSTM acoustic model provides relative Word Error Rate (WER) improvements of 3-7% for different speaker and acoustic environment scenarios over an optimized single FLSTM model, while retaining a similar computational footprint.

This paper presents our modeling and architecture approaches for building a highly accurate low-latency language identification system to support multilingual spoken queries for voice assistants. A common approach to solve multilingual speech recognition is to run multiple monolingual ASR systems in parallel and rely on a language identification (LID) component that detects the input language. Conventionally, LID relies on acoustic only information to detect input language. We propose an approach that learns and combines acoustic level representations with embeddings estimated on ASR hypotheses resulting in up to 50% relative reduction of identification error rate, compared to a model that uses acoustic only features. Furthermore, to reduce the processing cost and latency, we exploit a streaming architecture to identify the spoken language early when the system reaches a predetermined confidence level, alleviating the need to run multiple ASR systems until the end of input query. The combined acoustic and text LID, coupled with our proposed streaming runtime architecture, results in an average of 1500ms early identification for more than 50% of utterances, with almost no degradation in accuracy. We also show improved results by adopting a semi-supervised learning (SSL) technique using the newly proposed model architecture as a teacher model., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures

We present a speech data corpus that simulates a "dinner party" scenario taking place in an everyday home environment. The corpus was created by recording multiple groups of four Amazon employee volunteers having a natural conversation in English around a dining table. The participants were recorded by a single-channel close-talk microphone and by five far-field 7-microphone array devices positioned at different locations in the recording room. The dataset contains the audio recordings and human labeled transcripts of a total of 10 sessions with a duration between 15 and 45 minutes. The corpus was created to advance in the field of noise robust and distant speech processing and is intended to serve as a public research and benchmarking data set.

For real-world speech recognition applications, noise robustness is still a challenge. In this work, we adopt the teacher-student (T/S) learning technique using a parallel clean and noisy corpus for improving automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance under multimedia noise. On top of that, we apply a logits selection method which only preserves the k highest values to prevent wrong emphasis of knowledge from the teacher and to reduce bandwidth needed for transferring data. We incorporate up to 8000 hours of untranscribed data for training and present our results on sequence trained models apart from cross entropy trained ones. The best sequence trained student model yields relative word error rate (WER) reductions of approximately 10.1%, 28.7% and 19.6% on our clean, simulated noisy and real test sets respectively comparing to a sequence trained teacher., Comment: To Appear in ICASSP 2019

In this work, we propose a classifier for distinguishing device-directed queries from background speech in the context of interactions with voice assistants. Applications include rejection of false wake-ups or unintended interactions as well as enabling wake-word free follow-up queries. Consider the example interaction: $"Computer,~play~music", "Computer,~reduce~the~volume"$. In this interaction, the user needs to repeat the wake-word ($Computer$) for the second query. To allow for more natural interactions, the device could immediately re-enter listening state after the first query (without wake-word repetition) and accept or reject a potential follow-up as device-directed or background speech. The proposed model consists of two long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks trained on acoustic features and automatic speech recognition (ASR) 1-best hypotheses, respectively. A feed-forward deep neural network (DNN) is then trained to combine the acoustic and 1-best embeddings, derived from the LSTMs, with features from the ASR decoder. Experimental results show that ASR decoder, acoustic embeddings, and 1-best embeddings yield an equal-error-rate (EER) of $9.3~\%$, $10.9~\%$ and $20.1~\%$, respectively. Combination of the features resulted in a $44~\%$ relative improvement and a final EER of $5.2~\%$., Comment: Interspeech 2018 (accepted)