2017/12/05 by Bo Li, Tara N. Sainath, Li, Bo +15 · 3 citations
Computer Science · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Music and Audio Processing #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1712.01541
openalex publication_date 2017/12/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Sequence-to-sequence models provide a simple and elegant solution for building speech recognition systems by folding separate components of a typical system, namely acoustic (AM), pronunciation (PM) and language (LM) models into a single neural network. In this work, we look at one such sequence-to-sequence model, namely listen, attend and spell (LAS), and explore the possibility of training a single model to serve different English dialects, which simplifies the process of training multi-dialect systems without the need for separate AM, PM and LMs for each dialect. We show that simply pooling the data from all dialects into one LAS model falls behind the performance of a model fine-tuned on each dialect. We then look at incorporating dialect-specific information into the model, both by modifying the training targets by inserting the dialect symbol at the end of the original grapheme sequence and also feeding a 1-hot representation of the dialect information into all layers of the model. Experimental results on seven English dialects show that our proposed system is effective in modeling dialect variations within a single LAS model, outperforming a LAS model trained individually on each of the seven dialects by 3.1 ~ 16.5% relative.