BASS: Block-wise Adaptation for Speech Summarization
Roshan Sharma Kenneth Zheng Siddhant Arora Shinji Watanabe Rita Singh Bhiksha Raj
End-to-end speech summarization has been shown to improve performance over
cascade baselines. However, such models are difficult to train on very large
inputs (dozens of minutes or hours) owing to compute restrictions and are hence
trained with truncated model inputs. Truncation leads to poorer models, and a
solution to this problem rests in block-wise modeling, i.e., processing a
portion of the input frames at a time. In this paper, we develop a method that
allows one to train summarization models on very long sequences in an
incremental manner. Speech summarization is realized as a streaming process,
where hypothesis summaries are updated every block based on new acoustic
information. We devise and test strategies to pass semantic context across the
blocks. Experiments on the How2 dataset demonstrate that the proposed
block-wise training method improves by 3 points absolute on ROUGE-L over a
truncated input baseline.