In this work we present simple grapheme-based system for low-resource speech recognition using Babel data for Turkish spontaneous speech (80 h). We have investigated different neural network architectures performance, including fully-convolutional, recurrent and ResNet with GRU. Different features and normalization techniques are compared as well. We also proposed CTC-loss modification using segmentation during training, which leads to improvement while decoding with small beam size.
Recently, a new modification of DeepSpeech2 architecture was proposed in @cite_22 . Several lower convolutional layers were replaced with a deep residual network with depth-wise separable convolutions. This modification along with using strong regularization and data augmentation techniques leads to the results close to DeepSpeech2 in spite of significantly lower amount of data used for training. Indeed, one of the models was trained with only 80 hours of speech data (which were augmented with noisy and speed-perturbed versions of original data).
@cite_22
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Regularization is important for end-to-end speech models, since the models are highly flexible and easy to overfit. Data augmentation and dropout has been important for improving end-to-end models in other domains. However, they are relatively under explored for end-to-end speech models. Therefore, we investigate the effectiveness of both methods for end-to-end trainable, deep speech recognition models. We augment audio data through random perturbations of tempo, pitch, volume, temporal alignment, and adding random noise.We further investigate the effect of dropout when applied to the inputs of all layers of the network. We show that the combination of data augmentation and dropout give a relative performance improvement on both Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and LibriSpeech dataset of over 20 . Our model performance is also competitive with other end-to-end speech models on both datasets.