An End-to-End Language-Tracking Speech Recognizer for Mixed-Language Speech

• Main Authors: Seki, Hiroshi, Watanabe, Shinji, Hori, Takaaki, Roux, Jonathan Le, Hershey, John R.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Subjects: Automatic speech recognition; Computer architecture; Dictionaries; End-to-end ASR; hybrid attention/CTC; language identification; language-independent architecture; Linguistics; multilingual ASR; Neural networks; Training
• ISSN: 2379-190X
• DOI: 10.1109/ICASSP.2018.8462180

End-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) can significantly reduce the burden of developing ASR systems for new languages, by eliminating the need for linguistic information such as pronunciation dictionaries. This also creates an opportunity to build a monolithic multilingual ASR system with a language-independent neural network architecture. In our previous work, we proposed a monolithic neural network architecture that can recognize multiple languages, and showed its effectiveness compared with conventional language-dependent models. However, the model is not guaranteed to properly handle switches in language within an utterance, thus lacking the flexibility to recognize mixed-language speech such as code-switching. In this paper, we extend our model to enable dynamic tracking of the language within an utterance, and propose a training procedure that takes advantage of a newly created mixed-language speech corpus. Experimental results show that the extended model outperforms both language-dependent models and our previous model without suffering from performance degradation that could be associated with language switching.