Papers › Faster, Simpler and More Accurate Hybrid ASR Systems Using Wordpieces

Faster, Simpler and More Accurate Hybrid ASR Systems Using Wordpieces

19 May 2020arXiv:2005.09150archive 2025-07-28

Frank Zhang, Yongqiang Wang, Xiaohui Zhang, Chunxi Liu, Yatharth Saraf, Geoffrey Zweig

In this work, we first show that on the widely used LibriSpeech benchmark, our transformer-based context-dependent connectionist temporal classification (CTC) system produces state-of-the-art results. We then show that using wordpieces as modeling units combined with CTC training, we can greatly simplify the engineering pipeline compared to conventional frame-based cross-entropy training by excluding all the GMM bootstrapping, decision tree building and force alignment steps, while still achieving very competitive word-error-rate. Additionally, using wordpieces as modeling units can significantly improve runtime efficiency since we can use larger stride without losing accuracy. We further confirm these findings on two internal VideoASR datasets: German, which is similar to English as a fusional language, and Turkish, which is an agglutinative language.

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Tasks

Speech Recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Speech Recognition LibriSpeech test-clean CTC + Transformer LM rescoring Word Error Rate (WER) 2.10 #29 of 64 Archive leaderboard report
Speech Recognition LibriSpeech test-other CTC + Transformer LM rescoring Word Error Rate (WER) 4.20 #20 of 53 Archive leaderboard report

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