ASAPP-ASR: Multistream CNN and Self-Attentive SRU for SOTA Speech Recognition

21 May 2020  ·  Jing Pan, Joshua Shapiro, Jeremy Wohlwend, Kyu J. Han, Tao Lei, Tao Ma ·

In this paper we present state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on the LibriSpeech corpus with two novel neural network architectures, a multistream CNN for acoustic modeling and a self-attentive simple recurrent unit (SRU) for language modeling. In the hybrid ASR framework, the multistream CNN acoustic model processes an input of speech frames in multiple parallel pipelines where each stream has a unique dilation rate for diversity. Trained with the SpecAugment data augmentation method, it achieves relative word error rate (WER) improvements of 4% on test-clean and 14% on test-other. We further improve the performance via N-best rescoring using a 24-layer self-attentive SRU language model, achieving WERs of 1.75% on test-clean and 4.46% on test-other.

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Datasets


Task Dataset Model Metric Name Metric Value Global Rank Result Benchmark
Speech Recognition LibriSpeech test-clean Multistream CNN with Self-Attentive SRU (WER includes text normalization) Word Error Rate (WER) 1.75 # 7
Speech Recognition LibriSpeech test-other Multistream CNN with Self-Attentive SRU Word Error Rate (WER) 4.46 # 21

Methods