Improving End-to-End Bangla Speech Recognition with Semi-supervised Training

Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics 2020 · Nafis Sadeq, Nafis Tahmid Chowdhury, Farhan Tanvir Utshaw, Shafayat Ahmed, Muhammad Abdullah Adnan ·

Automatic speech recognition systems usually require large annotated speech corpus for training. The manual annotation of a large corpus is very difficult. It can be very helpful to use unsupervised and semi-supervised learning methods in addition to supervised learning. In this work, we focus on using a semi-supervised training approach for Bangla Speech Recognition that can exploit large unpaired audio and text data. We encode speech and text data in an intermediate domain and propose a novel loss function based on the global encoding distance between encoded data to guide the semi-supervised training. Our proposed method reduces the Word Error Rate (WER) of the system from 37{\%} to 31.9{\%}.

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