2025/05/21 by Ke Hu, Krishna C. Puvvada, Hu, Ke +17 · 2 citations
Computer Science · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #Speech and dialogue systems #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2505.15646
openalex publication_date 2025/05/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We introduce a data-driven approach for enabling word-level timestamp prediction in the Canary model. Accurate timestamp information is crucial for a variety of downstream tasks such as speech content retrieval and timed subtitles. While traditional hybrid systems and end-to-end (E2E) models may employ external modules for timestamp prediction, our approach eliminates the need for separate alignment mechanisms. By leveraging the NeMo Forced Aligner (NFA) as a teacher model, we generate word-level timestamps and train the Canary model to predict timestamps directly. We introduce a new <|timestamp|> token, enabling the Canary model to predict start and end timestamps for each word. Our method demonstrates precision and recall rates between 80% and 90%, with timestamp prediction errors ranging from 20 to 120 ms across four languages, with minimal WER degradation. Additionally, we extend our system to automatic speech translation (AST) tasks, achieving timestamp prediction errors around 200 milliseconds.