{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/confidence-estimation-for-attention-based","title":"Confidence Estimation for Attention-based Sequence-to-sequence Models for Speech Recognition","arxiv_id":"2010.11428","date":"2020-10-22","proceeding":null,"authors":["Qiujia Li","David Qiu","Yu Zhang","Bo Li","Yanzhang He","Philip C. Woodland","Liangliang Cao","Trevor Strohman"],"abstract":"For various speech-related tasks, confidence scores from a speech recogniser are a useful measure to assess the quality of transcriptions. In traditional hidden Markov model-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, confidence scores can be reliably obtained from word posteriors in decoding lattices. However, for an ASR system with an auto-regressive decoder, such as an attention-based sequence-to-sequence model, computing word posteriors is difficult. An obvious alternative is to use the decoder softmax probability as the model confidence. In this paper, we first examine how some commonly used regularisation methods influence the softmax-based confidence scores and study the overconfident behaviour of end-to-end models. Then we propose a lightweight and effective approach named confidence estimation module (CEM) on top of an existing end-to-end ASR model. Experiments on LibriSpeech show that CEM can mitigate the overconfidence problem and can produce more reliable confidence scores with and without shallow fusion of a language model. Further analysis shows that CEM generalises well to speech from a moderately mismatched domain and can potentially improve downstream tasks such as semi-supervised learning.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11428v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.11428v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"confidence-estimation-for-attention-based","repo_url":"https://github.com/KrishnaDN/E2E_ASR_Confidence_Estimation","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"automatic-speech-recognition-2","task_name":"Automatic Speech Recognition"},{"task_slug":"automatic-speech-recognition","task_name":"Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)"},{"task_slug":"decoder","task_name":"Decoder"},{"task_slug":"language-modeling","task_name":"Language Modeling"},{"task_slug":"language-modelling","task_name":"Language Modelling"},{"task_slug":"speech-recognition","task_name":"Speech Recognition"},{"task_slug":"speech-recognition-1","task_name":"speech-recognition"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2010.11428","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}