{"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/n-best-asr-transformer-enhancing-slu","title":"N-Best ASR Transformer: Enhancing SLU Performance using Multiple ASR Hypotheses","arxiv_id":"2106.06519","date":"2021-06-11","proceeding":"ACL 2021 5","authors":["Karthik Ganesan","Pakhi Bamdev","Jaivarsan B","Amresh Venugopal","Abhinav Tushar"],"abstract":"Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) systems parse speech into semantic structures like dialog acts and slots. This involves the use of an Automatic Speech Recognizer (ASR) to transcribe speech into multiple text alternatives (hypotheses). Transcription errors, common in ASRs, impact downstream SLU performance negatively. Approaches to mitigate such errors involve using richer information from the ASR, either in form of N-best hypotheses or word-lattices. We hypothesize that transformer models learn better with a simpler utterance representation using the concatenation of the N-best ASR alternatives, where each alternative is separated by a special delimiter [SEP]. In our work, we test our hypothesis by using concatenated N-best ASR alternatives as the input to transformer encoder models, namely BERT and XLM-RoBERTa, and achieve performance equivalent to the prior state-of-the-art model on DSTC2 dataset. We also show that our approach significantly outperforms the prior state-of-the-art when subjected to the low data regime. Additionally, this methodology is accessible to users of third-party ASR APIs which do not provide word-lattice information.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.06519v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2106.06519v1.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":"n-best-asr-transformer-enhancing-slu","repo_url":"https://github.com/Vernacular-ai/N-Best-ASR-Transformer","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"spoken-language-understanding","task_name":"Spoken Language Understanding"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"adam","method_name":"Adam"},{"method_slug":"attention","method_name":"Attention"},{"method_slug":"attention-dropout","method_name":"Attention Dropout"},{"method_slug":"bert","method_name":"BERT"},{"method_slug":"dense-connections","method_name":"Dense Connections"},{"method_slug":"dropout","method_name":"Dropout"},{"method_slug":"layer-normalization","method_name":"Layer Normalization"},{"method_slug":"linear-layer","method_name":"Linear Layer"},{"method_slug":"linear-warmup-with-linear-decay","method_name":"Linear Warmup With Linear Decay"},{"method_slug":"multi-head-attention","method_name":"Multi-Head Attention"},{"method_slug":"residual-connection","method_name":"Residual Connection"},{"method_slug":"softmax","method_name":"Softmax"},{"method_slug":"weight-decay","method_name":"Weight Decay"},{"method_slug":"wordpiece","method_name":"WordPiece"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2106.06519","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2106.06519","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}