In this paper, we propose a deep learning-based algorithm to improve the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for aphasia, apraxia, and dysarthria speech by utilizing electroencephalography (EEG) features recorded synchronously with aphasia, apraxia, and dysarthria speech. We demonstrate a significant decoding performance improvement by more than 50\% during test time for isolated speech recognition task and we also provide preliminary results indicating performance improvement for the more challenging continuous speech recognition task by utilizing EEG features. The results presented in this paper show the first step towards demonstrating the possibility of utilizing non-invasive neural signals to design a real-time robust speech prosthetic for stroke survivors recovering from aphasia, apraxia, and dysarthria. Our aphasia, apraxia, and dysarthria speech-EEG data set will be released to the public to help further advance this interesting and crucial research.
Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) based end-to-end speech recognition system usually need to incorporate an external language model by using WFST-based decoding in order to achieve promising results. This is more essential to Mandarin speech recognition since it owns a special phenomenon, namely homophone, which causes a lot of substitution errors. The linguistic information introduced by language model will help to distinguish these substitution errors. In this work, we propose a transformer based spelling correction model to automatically correct errors especially the substitution errors made by CTC-based Mandarin speech recognition system. Specifically, we investigate using the recognition results generated by CTC-based systems as input and the ground-truth transcriptions as output to train a transformer with encoder-decoder architecture, which is much similar to machine translation. Results in a 20,000 hours Mandarin speech recognition task show that the proposed spelling correction model can achieve a CER of 3.41%, which results in 22.9% and 53.2% relative improvement compared to the baseline CTC-based systems decoded with and without language model respectively.
Despite the remarkable progress recently made in distant speech recognition, state-of-the-art technology still suffers from a lack of robustness, especially when adverse acoustic conditions characterized by non-stationary noises and reverberation are met. A prominent limitation of current systems lies in the lack of matching and communication between the various technologies involved in the distant speech recognition process. The speech enhancement and speech recognition modules are, for instance, often trained independently. Moreover, the speech enhancement normally helps the speech recognizer, but the output of the latter is not commonly used, in turn, to improve the speech enhancement. To address both concerns, we propose a novel architecture based on a network of deep neural networks, where all the components are jointly trained and better cooperate with each other thanks to a full communication scheme between them. Experiments, conducted using different datasets, tasks and acoustic conditions, revealed that the proposed framework can overtake other competitive solutions, including recent joint training approaches.
With the rapid development of speech assistants, adapting server-intended automatic speech recognition (ASR) solutions to a direct device has become crucial. Researchers and industry prefer to use end-to-end ASR systems for on-device speech recognition tasks. This is because end-to-end systems can be made resource-efficient while maintaining a higher quality compared to hybrid systems. However, building end-to-end models requires a significant amount of speech data. Another challenging task associated with speech assistants is personalization, which mainly lies in handling out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. In this work, we consider building an effective end-to-end ASR system in low-resource setups with a high OOV rate, embodied in Babel Turkish and Babel Georgian tasks. To address the aforementioned problems, we propose a method of dynamic acoustic unit augmentation based on the BPE-dropout technique. It non-deterministically tokenizes utterances to extend the token's contexts and to regularize their distribution for the model's recognition of unseen words. It also reduces the need for optimal subword vocabulary size search. The technique provides a steady improvement in regular and personalized (OOV-oriented) speech recognition tasks (at least 6% relative WER and 25% relative F-score) at no additional computational cost. Owing to the use of BPE-dropout, our monolingual Turkish Conformer established a competitive result with 22.2% character error rate (CER) and 38.9% word error rate (WER), which is close to the best published multilingual system.
Building an accurate automatic speech recognition (ASR) system requires a large dataset that contains many hours of labeled speech samples produced by a diverse set of speakers. The lack of such open free datasets is one of the main issues preventing advancements in ASR research. To address this problem, we propose to augment a natural speech dataset with synthetic speech. We train very large end-to-end neural speech recognition models using the LibriSpeech dataset augmented with synthetic speech. These new models achieve state of the art Word Error Rate (WER) for character-level based models without an external language model.
This paper focuses on designing a noise-robust end-to-end Audio-Visual Speech Recognition (AVSR) system. To this end, we propose Visual Context-driven Audio Feature Enhancement module (V-CAFE) to enhance the input noisy audio speech with a help of audio-visual correspondence. The proposed V-CAFE is designed to capture the transition of lip movements, namely visual context and to generate a noise reduction mask by considering the obtained visual context. Through context-dependent modeling, the ambiguity in viseme-to-phoneme mapping can be refined for mask generation. The noisy representations are masked out with the noise reduction mask resulting in enhanced audio features. The enhanced audio features are fused with the visual features and taken to an encoder-decoder model composed of Conformer and Transformer for speech recognition. We show the proposed end-to-end AVSR with the V-CAFE can further improve the noise-robustness of AVSR. The effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated in noisy speech recognition and overlapped speech recognition experiments using the two largest audio-visual datasets, LRS2 and LRS3.
The practical aspects of developing an Automatic Speech Recognition System (ASR) with HTK are reviewed. Steps are explained concerning hardware, software, libraries, applications and computer programs used. The common procedure to rapidly apply speech recognition system is summarized. The procedure is illustrated, to implement a speech based electrical switch in home automation for the Indonesian language. The main key of the procedure is to match the environment for training and testing using the training data recorded from the testing program, HVite. Often the silence detector of HTK is wrongly triggered by noises because the microphone is too sensitive. This problem is mitigated by simply scaling down the volume. In this sub-word phone-based speech recognition, noise is included in the training database and labelled particularly. Illustration of the procedure is applied to a home automation application. Electrical switches are controlled by Indonesian speech recognizer. The results show 100% command completion rate.
Despite showing state-of-the-art performance, deep learning for speech recognition remains challenging to deploy in on-device edge scenarios such as mobile and other consumer devices. Recently, there have been greater efforts in the design of small, low-footprint deep neural networks (DNNs) that are more appropriate for edge devices, with much of the focus on design principles for hand-crafting efficient network architectures. In this study, we explore a human-machine collaborative design strategy for building low-footprint DNN architectures for speech recognition through a marriage of human-driven principled network design prototyping and machine-driven design exploration. The efficacy of this design strategy is demonstrated through the design of a family of highly-efficient DNNs (nicknamed EdgeSpeechNets) for limited-vocabulary speech recognition. Experimental results using the Google Speech Commands dataset for limited-vocabulary speech recognition showed that EdgeSpeechNets have higher accuracies than state-of-the-art DNNs (with the best EdgeSpeechNet achieving ~97% accuracy), while achieving significantly smaller network sizes (as much as 7.8x smaller) and lower computational cost (as much as 36x fewer multiply-add operations, 10x lower prediction latency, and 16x smaller memory footprint on a Motorola Moto E phone), making them very well-suited for on-device edge voice interface applications.
Multichannel linear filters, such as the Multichannel Wiener Filter (MWF) and the Generalized Eigenvalue (GEV) beamformer are popular signal processing techniques which can improve speech recognition performance. In this paper, we present an experimental study on these linear filters in a specific speech recognition task, namely the CHiME-4 challenge, which features real recordings in multiple noisy environments. Specifically, the rank-1 MWF is employed for noise reduction and a new constant residual noise power constraint is derived which enhances the recognition performance. To fulfill the underlying rank-1 assumption, the speech covariance matrix is reconstructed based on eigenvectors or generalized eigenvectors. Then the rank-1 constrained MWF is evaluated with alternative multichannel linear filters under the same framework, which involves a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) network for mask estimation. The proposed filter outperforms alternative ones, leading to a 40% relative Word Error Rate (WER) reduction compared with the baseline Weighted Delay and Sum (WDAS) beamformer on the real test set, and a 15% relative WER reduction compared with the GEV-BAN method. The results also suggest that the speech recognition accuracy correlates more with the Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) feature variance than with the noise reduction or the speech distortion level.
Recently, increasing attention has been directed to the study of the speech emotion recognition, in which global acoustic features of an utterance are mostly used to eliminate the content differences. However, the expression of speech emotion is a dynamic process, which is reflected through dynamic durations, energies, and some other prosodic information when one speaks. In this paper, a novel local dynamic pitch probability distribution feature, which is obtained by drawing the histogram, is proposed to improve the accuracy of speech emotion recognition. Compared with most of the previous works using global features, the proposed method takes advantage of the local dynamic information conveyed by the emotional speech. Several experiments on Berlin Database of Emotional Speech are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. The experimental results demonstrate that the local dynamic information obtained with the proposed method is more effective for speech emotion recognition than the traditional global features.
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