Isabel Leal
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Self-Adaptive Distillation for Multilingual Speech Recognition: Leveraging Student Independence
Brian Farris
Pedro Jose Moreno Mengibar
Yun Zhu
Interspeech 2021 (to appear)
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With a large population of the world speaking more than one language, multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) has gained popularity in the recent years. While lower resource languages can benefit from quality improvements in a multilingual ASR system, including unrelated or higher resource languages in the mix often results in performance degradation. In this paper, we propose distilling from multiple teachers, with each language using its best teacher during training, to tackle this problem. We introduce self-adaptive distillation, a novel technique for automatic weighting of the distillation loss that uses the student/teachers confidences. We analyze the effectiveness of the proposed techniques on two real world use-cases and show that the performance of the multilingual ASR models can be improved by up to 11.5% without any increase in model capacity. Furthermore, we show that when our methods are combined with increase in model capacity, we can achieve quality gains of up to 20.7%.
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Mixture of Informed Experts for Multilingual Speech Recognition
Brian Farris
Pedro Jose Moreno Mengibar
Yun Zhu
ICASSP 2021, IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (to appear)
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Multilingual speech recognition models are capable of recognizing speech in multiple different languages. When trained on related or low-resource languages, these models often outperform their monolingual counterparts. Similar to other forms of multi-task models, when the group of languages are unrelated, or when large amounts of training data is available, multilingual models can suffer from performance loss. We investigate the use of a mixture-of-expert approach to assign per-language parameters in the model to increase network capacity in a structured fashion. We introduce a novel variant of this approach, 'informed experts', which attempts to tackle inter-task conflicts by eliminating gradients from other tasks in the these task-specific parameters. We conduct experiments on a real-world task on English, French and four dialects of Arabic to show the effectiveness of our approach.
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Multilingual Speech Recognition with Self-Attention Structured Parameterization
Yun Zhu
Brian Farris
Hainan Xu
Han Lu
Pedro Jose Moreno Mengibar
Qian Zhang
Interspeech 2020, 21st Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, ISCA
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Multilingual automatic speech recognition systems can transcribe utterances from different languages. These systems are attractive from different perspectives: they can provide quality improvements, specially for lower resource languages, and simplify the training and deployment procedure. End-to-end speech recognition has further simplified multilingual modeling as one model, instead of several components of a classical system, have to be unified. In this paper, we investigate a streamable end-to-end multilingual system based on the Transformer Transducer. We propose several techniques for adapting the self-attention architecture based on the language id. We analyze the trade-offs of each method with regards to quality gains and number of additional parameters introduced. We conduct experiments in a real-world task consisting of five languages. Our experimental results demonstrate $\sim$10\% and $\sim$15\% relative gain over the baseline multilingual model.
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