SpeechNet: Weakly Supervised, End-to-End Speech Recognition at Industrial Scale
Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, Gefei Yang, Akshat Pandey, Yajie Mao, Vladislav Belyaev, Madhuri Emmadi, Craig Murray
Abstract
End-to-end automatic speech recognition systems represent the state of the art, but they rely on thousands of hours of manually annotated speech for training, as well as heavyweight computation for inference. Of course, this impedes commercialization since most companies lack vast human and computational resources. In this paper, we explore training and deploying an ASR system in the label-scarce, compute-limited setting. To reduce human labor, we use a third-party ASR system as a weak supervision source, supplemented with labeling functions derived from implicit user feedback. To accelerate inference, we propose to route production-time queries across a pool of CUDA graphs of varying input lengths, the distribution of which best matches the traffic’s. Compared to our third-party ASR, we achieve a relative improvement in word-error rate of 8% and a speedup of 600%. Our system, called SpeechNet, currently serves 12 million queries per day on our voice-enabled smart television. To our knowledge, this is the first time a large-scale, Wav2vec-based deployment has been described in the academic literature.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{tang-etal-2022-speechnet,
title = "{S}peech{N}et: Weakly Supervised, End-to-End Speech Recognition at Industrial Scale",
author = "Tang, Raphael and
Kumar, Karun and
Yang, Gefei and
Pandey, Akshat and
Mao, Yajie and
Belyaev, Vladislav and
Emmadi, Madhuri and
Murray, Craig and
Ture, Ferhan and
Lin, Jimmy",
editor = "Li, Yunyao and
Lazaridou, Angeliki",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track",
month = dec,
year = "2022",
address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-industry.29/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-industry.29",
pages = "285--293"
}