2021/12/02 by Vishwanath Pratap Singh, Singh, Vishwanath Pratap, Shakti P. Rath +3
Computer Science · Engineering · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Music and Audio Processing #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #Speech and Audio Processing #cs.CL #cs.SD #eess.AS #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2112.01025
arxiv created 2021/12/02 · openalex publication_date 2021/12/02 · arxiv updated 2021/12/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
This paper presents a novel deep learning architecture for acoustic model in the context of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), termed as MixNet. Besides the conventional layers, such as fully connected layers in DNN-HMM and memory cells in LSTM-HMM, the model uses two additional layers based on Mixture of Experts (MoE). The first MoE layer operating at the input is based on pre-defined broad phonetic classes and the second layer operating at the penultimate layer is based on automatically learned acoustic classes. In natural speech, overlap in distribution across different acoustic classes is inevitable, which leads to inter-class mis-classification. The ASR accuracy is expected to improve if the conventional architecture of acoustic model is modified to make them more suitable to account for such overlaps. MixNet is developed keeping this in mind. Analysis conducted by means of scatter diagram verifies that MoE indeed improves the separation between classes that translates to better ASR accuracy. Experiments are conducted on a large vocabulary ASR task which show that the proposed architecture provides 13.6% and 10.0% relative reduction in word error rates compared to the conventional models, namely, DNN and LSTM respectively, trained using sMBR criteria. In comparison to an existing method developed for phone-classification (by Eigen et al), our proposed method yields a significant improvement.