Title: Integrating Pre-Trained Speech and Language Models for End-to-End Speech Recognition
Authors: Yukiya Hono, Koh Mitsuda, Tianyu Zhao, Kentaro Mitsui, Toshiaki Wakatsuki, Kei Sawada
Published: 6th December 2023 (Wednesday) @ 18:34:42
Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2312.03668v2
Abstract
Advances in machine learning have made it possible to perform various text and speech processing tasks, such as automatic speech recognition (ASR), in an end-to-end (E2E) manner. E2E approaches utilizing pre-trained models are gaining attention for conserving training data and resources. However, most of their applications in ASR involve only one of either a pre-trained speech or a language model. This paper proposes integrating a pre-trained speech representation model and a large language model (LLM) for E2E ASR. The proposed model enables the optimization of the entire ASR process, including acoustic feature extraction and acoustic and language modeling, by combining pre-trained models with a bridge network and also enables the application of remarkable developments in LLM utilization, such as parameter-efficient domain adaptation and inference optimization. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves a performance comparable to that of modern E2E ASR models by utilizing powerful pre-training models with the proposed integrated approach.