AWARD    MERL's Speech Team Achieves World's 2nd Best Performance at the Third CHiME Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge

Date:

December 15, 2015

Awarded to:

John R. Hershey, Takaaki Hori, Jonathan Le Roux and Shinji Watanabe

Description:

The results of the third 'CHiME' Speech Separation and Recognition Challenge were publicly announced on December 15 at the IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU 2015) held in Scottsdale, Arizona, USA. MERL's Speech and Audio Team, in collaboration with SRI, ranked 2nd out of 26 teams from Europe, Asia and the US. The task this year was to recognize speech recorded using a tablet in real environments such as cafes, buses, or busy streets. Due to the high levels of noise and the distance from the speaker's mouth to the microphones, this is very challenging task, where the baseline system only achieved 33.4% word error rate. The MERL/SRI system featured state-of-the-art techniques including multi-channel front-end, noise-robust feature extraction, and deep learning for speech enhancement, acoustic modeling, and language modeling, leading to a dramatic 73% reduction in word error rate, down to 9.1%. The core of the system has since been released as a new official challenge baseline for the community to use.

External Link:

http://spandh.dcs.shef.ac.uk/chime_challenge/results.html

Research Area:

Speech & Audio

• Related Publications

   Hori, T., Chen, Z., Erdogan, H., Hershey, J.R., Le Roux, J., Mitra, V., Watanabe, S., "The MERL/SRI System for the 3rd CHiME Challenge Using Beamforming, Robust Feature Extraction, and Advanced Speech Recognition", IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU), DOI: 10.1109/​ASRU.2015.7404833, December 2015, pp. 475-481.

  BibTeX TR2015-135 PDF

  • @inproceedings{Hori2015dec2,
  • author = {Hori, T. and Chen, Z. and Erdogan, H. and Hershey, J.R. and {Le Roux}, J. and Mitra, V. and Watanabe, S.},
  • title = {The MERL/SRI System for the 3rd CHiME Challenge Using Beamforming, Robust Feature Extraction, and Advanced Speech Recognition},
  • booktitle = {IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU)},
  • year = 2015,
  • pages = {475--481},
  • month = dec,
  • publisher = {IEEE},
  • doi = {10.1109/ASRU.2015.7404833},
  • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2015-135}
  • }