This paper investigates the impact of word-based RNN language models (RNN-LMs) on the performance of end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR). In our prior work, we have proposed a multi-level LM, in which character-based and word-based RNN-LMs are combined in hybrid CTC attention-based ASR. Although this multi-level approach achieves significant error reduction in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) task, two different LMs need to be trained and used for decoding, which increase the computational cost and memory usage. In this paper, we further propose a novel word-based RNN-LM, which allows us to decode with only the word-based LM, where it provides look-ahead word probabilities to predict next characters instead of the character-based LM, leading competitive accuracy with less computation compared to the multi-level LM. We demonstrate the efficacy of the word-based RNN-LMs using a larger corpus, LibriSpeech, in addition to WSJ we used in the prior work. Furthermore, we show that the proposed model achieves 5.1 WER for WSJ Eval'92 test set when the vocabulary size is increased, which is the best WER reported for end-to-end ASR systems on this benchmark.
 Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is an end-to-end learning approach for automated translation, with the potential to overcome many of the weaknesses of conventional phrase-based translation systems. Unfortunately, NMT systems are known to be computationally expensive both in training and in translation inference. Also, most NMT systems have difficulty with rare words. These issues have hindered NMT's use in practical deployments and services, where both accuracy and speed are essential. In this work, we present GNMT, Google's Neural Machine Translation system, which attempts to address many of these issues. Our model consists of a deep LSTM network with 8 encoder and 8 decoder layers using attention and residual connections. To improve parallelism and therefore decrease training time, our attention mechanism connects the bottom layer of the decoder to the top layer of the encoder. To accelerate the final translation speed, we employ low-precision arithmetic during inference computations. To improve handling of rare words, we divide words into a limited set of common sub-word units ("wordpieces") for both input and output. This method provides a good balance between the flexibility of "character"-delimited models and the efficiency of "word"-delimited models, naturally handles translation of rare words, and ultimately improves the overall accuracy of the system. Our beam search technique employs a length-normalization procedure and uses a coverage penalty, which encourages generation of an output sentence that is most likely to cover all the words in the source sentence. On the WMT'14 English-to-French and English-to-German benchmarks, GNMT achieves competitive results to state-of-the-art. Using a human side-by-side evaluation on a set of isolated simple sentences, it reduces translation errors by an average of 60 compared to Google's phrase-based production system. We investigate training end-to-end speech recognition models with the recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T): a streaming, all-neural, sequence-to-sequence architecture which jointly learns acoustic and language model components from transcribed acoustic data. We explore various model architectures and demonstrate how the model can be improved further if additional text or pronunciation data are available. The model consists of an ‘encoder’, which is initialized from a connectionist temporal classification-based (CTC) acoustic model, and a ‘decoder’ which is partially initialized from a recurrent neural network language model trained on text data alone. The entire neural network is trained with the RNN-T loss and directly outputs the recognized transcript as a sequence of graphemes, thus performing end-to-end speech recognition. We find that performance can be improved further through the use of sub-word units ('wordpieces') which capture longer context and significantly reduce substitution errors. The best RNN-T system, a twelve-layer LSTM encoder with a two-layer LSTM decoder trained with 30,000 wordpieces as output targets achieves a word error rate of 8.5 on voice-search and 5.2 on voice-dictation tasks and is comparable to a state-of-the-art baseline at 8.3 on voice-search and 5.4 voice-dictation.