Papers › CRF-based Single-stage Acoustic Modeling with CTC Topology

CRF-based Single-stage Acoustic Modeling with CTC Topology

16 Apr 2019archive 2025-07-28

Hongyu Xiang, Zhijian Ou

In this paper, we develop conditional random field (CRF) based single-stage (SS) acoustic modeling with connectionist temporal classification (CTC) inspired state topology, which is called CTC-CRF for short. CTC-CRF is conceptually simple, which basically implements a CRF layer on top of features generated by the bottom neural network with the special state topology. Like SS-LF-MMI (lattice-free maximum-mutual-information), CTC-CRFs can be trained from scratch (flat-start), eliminating GMM-HMM pre-training and tree-building. Evaluation experiments are conducted on the WSJ, Switchboard and Librispeech datasets. In a head-to-head comparison, the CTC-CRF model using simple Bidirectional LSTMs consistently outperforms the strong SS-LF-MMI, across all the three benchmarking datasets and in both cases of mono-phones and mono-chars. Additionally, CTC-CRFs avoid some ad-hoc operation in SS-LF-MMI.

PaperPDFCode

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

BenchmarkingSpeech Recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Speech Recognition LibriSpeech test-clean CTC-CRF 4gram-LM Word Error Rate (WER) 4.09 #52 of 64 Archive leaderboard report
Speech Recognition LibriSpeech test-other CTC-CRF 4gram-LM Word Error Rate (WER) 10.65 #48 of 53 Archive leaderboard report
Speech Recognition WSJ dev93 Convolutional Speech Recognition Word Error Rate (WER) 6.23 #3 of 4 Archive leaderboard report
Speech Recognition WSJ eval92 CTC-CRF 4gram-LM Word Error Rate (WER) 3.79 #15 of 17 Archive leaderboard report
Speech Recognition WSJ eval93 CTC-CRF 4gram-LM Word Error Rate (WER) 6.23 #2 of 3 Archive leaderboard report

Ranks are positions in the archive's leaderboards as they stood at the 2025-07-28 snapshot. Results published since then are not among these rows, so a rank here is not a current standing.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections