Word-level Speech Recognition with a Letter to Word Encoder

July 09, 2020

Abstract

We propose a direct-to-word sequence model which uses a word network to learn word embeddings from letters. The word network can be integrated seamlessly with arbitrary sequence models including Connectionist Temporal Classification and encoder-decoder models with attention. We show our direct-to-word model can achieve word error rate gains over sub-word level models for speech recognition. We also show that our direct-to-word approach retains the ability to predict words not seen at training time without any retraining. Finally, we demonstrate that a word-level model can use a larger stride than a sub-word level model while maintaining accuracy. This makes the model more efficient both for training and inference.

Download the Paper

AUTHORS

Written by

Ronan Collobert

Awni Hannun

Gabriel Synnaeve

Publisher

ICML

Research Topics

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Related Publications

May 06, 2026

HUMAN & MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

RESEARCH

NeuralBench: A Unifying Framework to Benchmark NeuroAI Models

Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Elisa Cascardi, Hubert Banville, Jarod Levy, Jean-Rémi King, Jérémy Rapin, Katelyn Begany, Marlene Careil, Simon Dahan, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Teon Brooks, Yohann Benchetrit

May 06, 2026

Read the Paper

May 04, 2026

NLP

Compute Optimal Tokenization

Sachin Mehta, Alisa Liu, Margaret Li, Artidoro Pagnoni, Gargi Ghosh, Luke Zettlemoyer, Mike Lewis, Srini Iyer, Tomasz Limisiewicz

May 04, 2026

Read the Paper

April 16, 2026

RESEARCH

AIRA₂: Overcoming Bottlenecks in AI Research Agents

Nicola Cancedda, Pontus Stenetorp, Alexis Audran-Reiss, Alisia Lupidi, Anton Protopopov, Bassel Al Omari, Carole-Jean Wu, Derek Dunfield, Despoina Magka, Edan Toledo, Hela Momand, Ishita Mediratta, Jakob Foerster, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Karen Hambardzumyan, Kelvin Niu, Martin Josifoski, Michael Kuchnik, Michael Shvartsman, Nicolas Baldwin, Parth Pathak, Rishi Hazra, Tatiana Shavrina, Thomas Simon Foster, Yoram Bachrach