Papers › Transformer-based Acoustic Modeling for Hybrid Speech Recognition

Transformer-based Acoustic Modeling for Hybrid Speech Recognition

22 Oct 2019arXiv:1910.09799archive 2025-07-28

Yongqiang Wang, Abdel-rahman Mohamed, Duc Le, Chunxi Liu, Alex Xiao, Jay Mahadeokar, Hongzhao Huang, Andros Tjandra, Xiaohui Zhang, Frank Zhang, Christian Fuegen, Geoffrey Zweig, Michael L. Seltzer

We propose and evaluate transformer-based acoustic models (AMs) for hybrid speech recognition. Several modeling choices are discussed in this work, including various positional embedding methods and an iterated loss to enable training deep transformers. We also present a preliminary study of using limited right context in transformer models, which makes it possible for streaming applications. We demonstrate that on the widely used Librispeech benchmark, our transformer-based AM outperforms the best published hybrid result by 19% to 26% relative when the standard n-gram language model (LM) is used. Combined with neural network LM for rescoring, our proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art results on Librispeech. Our findings are also confirmed on a much larger internal dataset.

PaperPDF

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

No code repository is listed for this paper in the archive or in Syntology's graph.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

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

Tasks

Language ModelingLanguage ModellingSpeech Recognitionspeech-recognition

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Speech Recognition LibriSpeech test-clean Hybrid + Transformer LM rescoring Word Error Rate (WER) 2.26 #34 of 64 Archive leaderboard report
Speech Recognition LibriSpeech test-other hybrid + Transformer LM rescoring Word Error Rate (WER) 4.85 #28 of 53 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.

Methods

AMAbsolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerReLUResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformer

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