7 accepted papers
We sometimes observe monotonically decreasing cross-attention weights in our Conformer-based global attention-based encoder-decoder (AED) models, negatively affecting performance compared to monotonically increasing attention weights. Further investigation shows that the Conformer encoder reverses t…
We study a streamable attention-based encoder-decoder model in which either the decoder, or both the encoder and decoder, operate on pre-defined, fixed-size windows called chunks. A special end-of-chunk (EOC) symbol advances from one chunk to the next chunk, effectively replacing the conventional en…
ASR can be improved by multi-task learning (MTL) with domain enhancing or domain adversarial training, which are two opposite objectives with the aim to increase/decrease domain variance towards domain-aware/agnostic ASR, respectively. In this work, we study how to best apply these two opposite obje…
The integration of language models for neural machine translation has been extensively studied in the past. It has been shown that an external language model, trained on additional target-side monolingual data, can help improve translation quality. However, there has always been the assumption that…
This work studies knowledge distillation (KD) and addresses its constraints for recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T) models. In hard distillation, a teacher model transcribes large amounts of unlabelled speech to train a student model. Soft distillation is another popular KD method that disti…
The recently proposed conformer architecture has been successfully used for end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) architectures achieving state-of-the-art performance on different datasets. To our best knowledge, the impact of using conformer acoustic model for hybrid ASR is not investigated…
Training deep neural networks is often challenging in terms of training stability. It often requires careful hyperparameter tuning or a pretraining scheme to converge. Layer normalization (LN) has shown to be a crucial ingredient in training deep encoder-decoder models. We explore various LN long sh…