Unidirectional Memory-Self-Attention Transducer for Online Speech Recognition

Memory-Self-Attention Transducer

Abstract

Self-attention models have been successfully applied in end-to-end speech recognition systems, which greatly improve the performance of recognition accuracy. However, such attention-based models cannot be used in online speech recognition, because these models usually have to utilize a whole acoustic sequences as inputs. A common method is restricting the field of attention sights by a fixed left and right window, which makes the computation costs manageable yet also introduces performance degradation. In this paper, we propose Memory-Self-Attention (MSA), which adds history information into the Restricted-Self-Attention unit. MSA only needs localtime features as inputs, and efficiently models long temporal contexts by attending memory states. Meanwhile, recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T) has proved to be a great approach for online ASR tasks, because the alignments of RNN-T are local and monotonic. We propose a novel network structure, called Memory-Self-Attention (MSA) Transducer. Both encoder and decoder of the MSA Transducer contain the proposed MSA unit. The experiments demonstrate that our proposed models improve WER results than Restricted-Self-Attention models by 13.5% on WSJ and 7.1% on SWBD datasets relatively, and without much computation costs increase.

Type
Publication
In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing
Click the Cite button above to demo the feature to enable visitors to import publication metadata into their reference management software.
Jian Luo
Jian Luo
Researcher