TR2019-100

Semi-supervised Sequence-to-sequence ASR using Unpaired Speech and Text


    •  Baskar, M.K., Watanabe, S., Astudillo, R., Hori, T., Burget, L., Cernocky, J.H., "Semi-supervised Sequence-to-sequence ASR using Unpaired Speech and Text", Interspeech, DOI: 10.21437/​Interspeech.2019-3167, September 2019, pp. 3790-3794.
      BibTeX TR2019-100 PDF
      • @inproceedings{Baskar2019sep,
      • author = {Baskar, Murali Karthick and Watanabe, Shinji and Astudillo, Ramon and Hori, Takaaki and Burget, Lukas and Cernocky, Jan, Honza},
      • title = {Semi-supervised Sequence-to-sequence ASR using Unpaired Speech and Text},
      • booktitle = {Interspeech},
      • year = 2019,
      • pages = {3790--3794},
      • month = sep,
      • doi = {10.21437/Interspeech.2019-3167},
      • issn = {1990-9772},
      • url = {https://www.merl.com/publications/TR2019-100}
      • }
  • Research Areas:

    Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio

Abstract:

Sequence-to-sequence automatic speech recognition (ASR) models require large quantities of data to attain high performance. For this reason, there has been a recent surge in interest for unsupervised and semi-supervised training in such models. This work builds upon recent results showing notable improvements in semi-supervised training using cycle-consistency and related techniques. Such techniques derive training procedures and losses able to leverage unpaired speech and/or text data by combining ASR with Text-to-Speech (TTS) models. In particular, this work proposes a new semi-supervised loss combining an end-to-end differentiable ASR->TTS loss with TTS->ASR loss. The method is able to leverage both unpaired speech and text data to outperform recently proposed related techniques in terms of %WER. We provide extensive results analyzing the impact of data quantity and speech and text modalities and show consistent gains across WSJ and Librispeech corpora. Our code is provided in ESPnet to reproduce the experiments.

 

  • Related News & Events

    •  NEWS    MERL Speech & Audio Researchers Presenting 7 Papers and a Tutorial at Interspeech 2019
      Date: September 15, 2019 - September 19, 2019
      Where: Graz, Austria
      MERL Contacts: Chiori Hori; Jonathan Le Roux; Gordon Wichern
      Research Areas: Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Speech & Audio
      Brief
      • MERL Speech & Audio Team researchers will be presenting 7 papers at the 20th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association INTERSPEECH 2019, which is being held in Graz, Austria from September 15-19, 2019. Topics to be presented include recent advances in end-to-end speech recognition, speech separation, and audio-visual scene-aware dialog. Takaaki Hori is also co-presenting a tutorial on end-to-end speech processing.

        Interspeech is the world's largest and most comprehensive conference on the science and technology of spoken language processing. It gathers around 2000 participants from all over the world.
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