{"id":649698,"date":"2020-04-10T21:31:36","date_gmt":"2020-04-11T04:31:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=649698"},"modified":"2020-04-10T21:31:36","modified_gmt":"2020-04-11T04:31:36","slug":"exploring-pre-training-with-alignments-for-rnn-transducer-based-end-to-end-speech-recognition","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/exploring-pre-training-with-alignments-for-rnn-transducer-based-end-to-end-speech-recognition\/","title":{"rendered":"Exploring pre-training with alignments for RNN transducer based end-to-end speech recognition"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Recently, the recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T) architecture<br \/>\nhas become an emerging trend in end-to-end automatic speech<br \/>\nrecognition research due to its advantages of being capable for online<br \/>\nstreaming speech recognition. However, RNN-T training is<br \/>\nmade difficult by the huge memory requirements, and complicated<br \/>\nneural structure. A common solution to ease the RNN-T training is<br \/>\nto employ connectionist temporal classification (CTC) model along<br \/>\nwith RNN language model (RNNLM) to initialize the RNN-T parameters.<br \/>\nIn this work, we conversely leverage external alignments<br \/>\nto seed the RNN-T model. Two different pre-training solutions are<br \/>\nexplored, referred to as encoder pre-training, and whole-network<br \/>\npre-training respectively. Evaluated on Microsoft 65,000 hours<br \/>\nanonymized production data with personally identifiable information<br \/>\nremoved, our proposed methods can obtain significant improvement.<br \/>\nIn particular, the encoder pre-training solution achieved a<br \/>\n10% and a 8% relative word error rate reduction when compared<br \/>\nwith random initialization and the widely used CTC+RNNLM initialization<br \/>\nstrategy, respectively. Our solutions also significantly<br \/>\nreduce the RNN-T model latency from the baseline.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Recently, the recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T) architecture has become an emerging trend in end-to-end automatic speech recognition research due to its advantages of being capable for online streaming speech recognition. However, RNN-T training is made difficult by the huge memory requirements, and complicated neural structure. A common solution to ease the RNN-T training is 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