Bigger is not Always Better: The Effect of Context Size on Speech
  Pre-Training
Sean Robertson Ewan Dunbar
It has been generally assumed in the automatic speech recognition (ASR)
literature that it is better for models to have access to wider context
windows. Yet, many of the potential reasons this might be true in the
supervised setting do not necessarily transfer over to the case of unsupervised
learning. We investigate how much context is necessary to achieve high-quality
pre-trained acoustic models using self-supervised learning. We principally
investigate contrastive predictive coding (CPC), which we adapt to be able to
precisely control the amount of context visible to the model during training
and inference. We find that phone discriminability in the resulting model
representations peaks at around 40~ms of preceding context, and that having too
much context (beyond around 320 ms) substantially degrades the quality of the
representations. Surprisingly, we find that this pattern also transfers to
supervised ASR when the pre-trained representations are used as frozen input
features. Our results point to potential changes in the design of current
upstream architectures to better facilitate a variety of downstream tasks.