about
Fast Text-Only Domain Adaptation of RNN-Transducer Prediction Network (arxiv.org)
2 points by hheikinh on Jun 25, 2021 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: The word-prediction part inside a speech recognizer is retrained on a small pile of text from the new domain, so no extra language model needs to be bolted on during decoding. This cut word errors by 10-45% on the target tasks.

Abstract

Adaption of end-to-end speech recognition systems to new tasks is known to be challenging. A number of solutions have been proposed which apply external language models with various fusion methods, possibly with a combination of two-pass decoding. Also TTS systems have been used to generate adaptation data for the end-to-end models. In this paper we show that RNN-transducer models can be effectively adapted to new domains using only small amounts of textual data. By taking advantage of model's inherent structure, where the prediction network is interpreted as a language model, we can apply fast adaptation to the model. Adapting the model avoids the need for complicated decoding time fusions and external language models. Using appropriate regularization, the prediction network can be adapted to new domains while still retaining good generalization capabilities. We show with multiple ASR evaluation tasks how this method can provide relative gains of 10-45% in target task WER. We also share insights how RNN-transducer prediction network performs as a language model.

Janne Pylkkönen, Antti Ukkonen, Juho Kilpikoski, Samu Tamminen, Hannes Heikinheimo
arXiv:2104.11127 · cs.CL, cs.SD, eess.AS · submitted Apr 22, 2021 · updated Jun 9, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · 5 pages, 2 figures. Accepted to Interspeech 2021

add comment on HN
Also discussed: Jul 2021 (2 points, 0 comments)