2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

2021 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing

6-11 June 2021 • Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Extracting Knowledge from Information

Technical Program

Paper Detail

Paper IDSPE-21.3
Paper Title A General Multi-Task Learning Framework to Leverage Text Data for Speech to Text Tasks
Authors Yun Tang, Juan Pino, Changhan Wang, Facebook, United States; Xutai Ma, Johns Hopkins University, United States; Dmitriy Genzel, Facebook, United States
SessionSPE-21: Speech Recognition 7: Training Methods for End-to-End Modeling
LocationGather.Town
Session Time:Wednesday, 09 June, 15:30 - 16:15
Presentation Time:Wednesday, 09 June, 15:30 - 16:15
Presentation Poster
Topic Speech Processing: [SPE-LVCR] Large Vocabulary Continuous Recognition/Search
IEEE Xplore Open Preview  Click here to view in IEEE Xplore
Virtual Presentation  Click here to watch in the Virtual Conference
Abstract Attention-based sequence-to-sequence modeling provides a powerful and elegant solution for applications that need to map one sequence to a different sequence. Its success heavily relies on the availability of large amounts of training data. This presents a challenge for speech applications where labelled speech data is very expensive to obtain, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) and speech translation (ST). In this study, we propose a general multi-task learning framework to leverage text data for ASR and ST tasks. Two auxiliary tasks, a denoising autoencoder task and machine translation task, are proposed to be co-trained with ASR and ST tasks respectively. We demonstrate that representing text input as phoneme sequences can reduce the difference between speech and text inputs, and enhance the knowledge transfer from text corpora to the speech to text tasks. Our experiments show that the proposed method achieves a relative 10~15% word error rate reduction on the English Librispeech task compared with our baseline, and improves the speech translation quality on the MuST-C tasks by 3.6~9.2 BLEU.