Interspeech
Lexicon-free speech recognition naturally deals with the problem of out-of-vocabulary (OOV) words. In this paper, we show that character-based language models (LM) can perform as well as word-based LMs for speech recognition, in word error rates (WER), even without restricting the decoding to a lexicon. We study character-based LMs and show that convolutional LMs can effectively leverage large (character) contexts, which is key for good speech recognition performance downstream. We specifically show that the lexicon-free decoding performance (WER) on utterances with OOV words using character-based LMs is better than lexicon-based decoding, with character or word-based LMs.
Donglai Xiang, Timur Bagautdinov, Tuur Stuyck, Fabian Prada, Javier Romero, Weipeng Xu, Shunsuke Saito, Jingfan Guo, Breannan Smith, Takaaki Shiratori, Yaser Sheikh, Jessica Hodgins, Chenglei Wu
Ludwig Sidenmark, Mark Parent, Chi-Hao Wu, Joannes Chan, Michael Glueck, Daniel Wigdor, Tovi Grossman, Marcello Giordano
Xingyi Zhou, Rohit Girdhar, Armand Joulin, Philipp Krähenbühl, Ishan Misra
