Application-Agnostic Language Modeling for On-Device ASR

Abstract

On-device automatic speech recognition systems face several challenges compared to server-based systems. They have to meet stricter constraints in terms of speed, disk size and memory while maintaining the same accuracy. Often they have to serve several ap- plications with different distributions at once, such as communicating with a virtual assistant and speech-to-text. The simplest solution to serve multiple applications is to build application-specific (language) models, but this leads to an increase in memory. Therefore, we explore different data- and architecture-driven language modeling approaches to build a single application-agnostic model. We propose two novel feed-forward architectures that find an optimal trade off between different on-device constraints. In comparison to the application-specific solution, one of our novel approaches reduces the disk size by half, while maintaining speed and accuracy of the original model.