CTC-Segmentation of Large Corpora for German End-to-end Speech Recognition

17 Jul 2020  ·  Ludwig Kürzinger, Dominik Winkelbauer, Lujun Li, Tobias Watzel, Gerhard Rigoll ·

Recent end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems demonstrated the ability to outperform conventional hybrid DNN/ HMM ASR. Aside from architectural improvements in those systems, those models grew in terms of depth, parameters and model capacity. However, these models also require more training data to achieve comparable performance. In this work, we combine freely available corpora for German speech recognition, including yet unlabeled speech data, to a big dataset of over $1700$h of speech data. For data preparation, we propose a two-stage approach that uses an ASR model pre-trained with Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) to boot-strap more training data from unsegmented or unlabeled training data. Utterances are then extracted from label probabilities obtained from the network trained with CTC to determine segment alignments. With this training data, we trained a hybrid CTC/attention Transformer model that achieves $12.8\%$ WER on the Tuda-DE test set, surpassing the previous baseline of $14.4\%$ of conventional hybrid DNN/HMM ASR.

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Ranked #5 on Speech Recognition on TUDA (using extra training data)

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Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Uses Extra
Training Data
Benchmark
Speech Recognition TUDA Hybrid CTC/Attention Test WER 12.8% # 5

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