Homophone Disambiguation Reveals Patterns of Context Mixing in Speech
  Transformers
Hosein Mohebbi Grzegorz Chrupała Willem Zuidema Afra Alishahi
Transformers have become a key architecture in speech processing, but our
understanding of how they build up representations of acoustic and linguistic
structure is limited. In this study, we address this gap by investigating how
measures of 'context-mixing' developed for text models can be adapted and
applied to models of spoken language. We identify a linguistic phenomenon that
is ideal for such a case study: homophony in French (e.g. livre vs livres),
where a speech recognition model has to attend to syntactic cues such as
determiners and pronouns in order to disambiguate spoken words with identical
pronunciations and transcribe them while respecting grammatical agreement. We
perform a series of controlled experiments and probing analyses on
Transformer-based speech models. Our findings reveal that representations in
encoder-only models effectively incorporate these cues to identify the correct
transcription, whereas encoders in encoder-decoder models mainly relegate the
task of capturing contextual dependencies to decoder modules.