2024/09/11 by Zhihong Lei, Lei, Zhihong, Xingyu Na +13 · 3 citations
Computer Science · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #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.2409.15353
openalex publication_date 2024/09/11 · openalex created_date 2024/10/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Large language models (LLMs) have shown superb capability of modeling multimodal signals including audio and text, allowing the model to generate spoken or textual response given a speech input. However, it remains a challenge for the model to recognize personal named entities, such as contacts in a phone book, when the input modality is speech. In this work, we start with a speech recognition task and propose a retrieval-based solution to contextualize the LLM: we first let the LLM detect named entities in speech without any context, then use this named entity as a query to retrieve phonetically similar named entities from a personal database and feed them to the LLM, and finally run context-aware LLM decoding. In a voice assistant task, our solution achieved up to 30.2% relative word error rate reduction and 73.6% relative named entity error rate reduction compared to a baseline system without contextualization. Notably, our solution by design avoids prompting the LLM with the full named entity database, making it highly efficient and applicable to large named entity databases.