RESEARCH

NLP

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

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