SOTAVerified

Transfer Learning for Speech Recognition on a Budget

2017-06-01WS 2017Code Available0· sign in to hype

Julius Kunze, Louis Kirsch, Ilia Kurenkov, Andreas Krug, Jens Johannsmeier, Sebastian Stober

Code Available — Be the first to reproduce this paper.

Reproduce

Code

Abstract

End-to-end training of automated speech recognition (ASR) systems requires massive data and compute resources. We explore transfer learning based on model adaptation as an approach for training ASR models under constrained GPU memory, throughput and training data. We conduct several systematic experiments adapting a Wav2Letter convolutional neural network originally trained for English ASR to the German language. We show that this technique allows faster training on consumer-grade resources while requiring less training data in order to achieve the same accuracy, thereby lowering the cost of training ASR models in other languages. Model introspection revealed that small adaptations to the network's weights were sufficient for good performance, especially for inner layers.

Tasks

Reproductions