Streaming Speech-to-Confusion Network Speech Recognition
Denis Filimonov Prabhat Pandey Ariya Rastrow Ankur Gandhe Andreas Stolcke
In interactive automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, low-latency
requirements limit the amount of search space that can be explored during
decoding, particularly in end-to-end neural ASR. In this paper, we present a
novel streaming ASR architecture that outputs a confusion network while
maintaining limited latency, as needed for interactive applications. We show
that 1-best results of our model are on par with a comparable RNN-T system,
while the richer hypothesis set allows second-pass rescoring to achieve 10-20\%
lower word error rate on the LibriSpeech task. We also show that our model
outperforms a strong RNN-T baseline on a far-field voice assistant task.