Semi-Supervised Learning with Data Augmentation for End-to-End ASR

In this paper, we apply Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) along with Data Augmentation (DA) for improving the accuracy of End-to-End ASR. We focus on the consistency regularization principle, which has been successfully applied to image classification tasks, and present sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) versions of the FixMatch and Noisy Student algorithms. Specifically, we generate the pseudo labels for the unlabeled data on-the-fly with a seq2seq model after perturbing the input features with DA. We also propose soft label variants of both algorithms to cope with pseudo label errors, showing further performance improvements. We conduct SSL experiments on a conversational speech data set with 1.9kh manually transcribed training data, using only 25% of the original labels (475h labeled data). In the result, the Noisy Student algorithm with soft labels and consistency regularization achieves 10.4% word error rate (WER) reduction when adding 475h of unlabeled data, corresponding to a recovery rate of 92%. Furthermore, when iteratively adding 950h more unlabeled data, our best SSL performance is within 5% WER increase compared to using the full labeled training set (recovery rate: 78%).