Publications
CONFERENCE (INTERNATIONAL) Keep Decoding Parallel With Effective Knowledge Distillation From Language Models To End-To-End Speech Recognisers
Michael Hentschel (LINE WORKS Corporation), Yuta Nishikawa (Nara Institute of Science and Technology), Tatsuya Komatsu, Yusuke Fujita
2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2024)
April 14, 2024
This study presents a novel approach for knowledge distillation (KD) from a BERT teacher model to an automatic speech recognition (ASR) model using intermediate layers. To distil the teacher’s knowledge, we use an attention decoder that learns from BERT’s token probabilities. Our method shows that language model (LM) information can be more effectively distilled into an ASR model using both the intermediate layers and the final layer. By using the intermediate layers as distillation target, we can more effectively distil LM knowledge into the lower network layers. Using our method, we achieve better recognition accuracy than with shallow fusion of an external LM, allowing us to maintain fast parallel decoding. Experiments on the LibriSpeech dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing greedy decoding with connectionist temporal classification (CTC).
Paper :
Keep Decoding Parallel With Effective Knowledge Distillation From Language Models To End-To-End Speech Recognisers
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