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Deep Speech 2: End-to-End Speech Recognition in English and Mandarin

Dario Amodei, Rishita Anubhai, Eric Battenberg

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Carl Case, Jared Casper, Bryan Catanzaro, Jingdong Chen, Mike Chrzanowski, Adam Coates, Greg Diamos, Erich Elsen, Jesse Engel, Linxi Fan, Christopher Fougner, Tony Han, Awni Hannun, Billy Jun, Patrick LeGresley, Libby Lin, Sharan Narang, Andrew Ng, Sherjil Ozair, Ryan Prenger, Jonathan Raiman, Sanjeev Satheesh, David Seetapun, Shubho Sengupta, Yi Wang, Zhiqian Wang, Chong Wang, Bo Xiao, Dani Yogatama, Jun Zhan, Zhenyao Zhu

2015 · arXiv

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From the abstract

We show that an end-to-end deep learning approach can be used to recognize either English or Mandarin Chinese speech--two vastly different languages. Because it replaces entire pipelines of hand-engineered components with neural networks, end-to-end learning allows us to handle a diverse variety of speech including noisy environments, accents and different languages. Key to our approach is our application of HPC techniques, resulting in a 7x speedup over our previous system. Because of this efficiency, experiments that previously took weeks now run in days. This enables us to iterate more quickly to identify superior architectures and algorithms. As a result, in several cases, our system is competitive with the transcription of human workers when benchmarked on standard datasets. Finally, using a technique called Batch Dispatch with GPUs in the data center, we show that our system can be inexpensively deployed in an online setting, delivering low latency when serving users at scale.

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4 selected excerpts · 4 total mentions

cute_boi
Neutral mention · rule
No need stupid moving texts. CS231n: Convolutional Neural Networks for Visual Recognition - https://cs231n.github.io/ The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Recurrent Neural Networks - https://karpathy.github.io/2015/05/21/rnn-effectiveness/ Understanding LSTM Networks - https://colah.github.io/posts/2015-08-Understanding-LSTMs/ ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks - https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2012/hash/c399862d3b9d6b76c8436... Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition - https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.03385 Multi-Scale Context Aggregation by Dilated Convolutions - https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.07122 Identity Mappings in Deep Residual Networks -…
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https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.05027 Recurrent Neural Network Regularization - https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.2329 Deep Speech 2: End-to-End Speech Recognition in English and Mandarin - https://arxiv.org/abs/1512.02595 Order Matters: Sequence to Sequence for Sets - https://arxiv.org/abs/1511.06391 Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate - https://arxiv.org/abs/1409.0473 Pointer Networks - https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.03134 Attention Is All You Need - https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 The Annotated Transformer - https://nlp.seas.harvard.edu/annotated-transformer/ Neural Turing Machines - https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5401 A Simple Neural Network Module for Relational Reasoning - https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.01427 Relational Recurrent Neural Networks - https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.01822 Neural Message Passing for Quantum Chemistry - https://arxiv.org/abs/1704.01212 Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models - https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361 GPipe: Efficient Training of Giant Neural Networks using Pipeline Parallelism - https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.06965 Keeping Neural Networks Simple by Minimizing the Description Length of the Weights - https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~hinton/absps/colt93.pdf A Tutorial Introduction to the Minimum Description Length Principle - https://arxiv.org/abs/math/0406077 The First Law of Complexodynamics - https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=762 Quantifying the Rise and Fall of Complexity in Closed Systems: The Coffee Automaton - https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.6903 Kolmogorov Complexity - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/047174882X Variational Lossy Autoencoder - https://arxiv.org/abs/1611.02731 Machine Super Intelligence - https://www.vetta.org/documents/Machine_Super_Intelligence.p...
brandonb
Neutral mention · rule
The acoustic model of a speech recognizer used to be a GMM, which mapped a pre-processed acoustic signal vector (generally MFCCs-Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients) to an HMM state. Now those layers are neural nets, so acoustic pre-processing, GMM, and HMM are all subsumed by the neural network and trained end-to-end. One early piece of work here was DeepSpeech2 (2015): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.02595
est31
Neutral mention · rule
> M-AILABS data contains 9 language varieties with a modified BSD 3-Clause License, however there is no community-driven aspect. There is certainly an aspect, as M-AILABS sources their data mainly from the librivox project, which is community-driven. To give ballpark numbers on what it would have cost if you had had to pay people for providing the data instead of getting it for free: It's low skilled labour so you'll likely find people to do it slightly above minimum wage. Let's take Germany as I'm most familiar with its rules and because that's where Common Voice is headquartered. Minimum wage here will be €9.35 / hr starting on Jan 1st. Let's say you pay them €11. There…
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are various Arbeitgeberanteile which you have to pay as well. Let's say your per-employee expense would amount to €15/hour. Let's assume you can verify and record at 70% efficiency and you use two people to verify. Then you need to expend 4.29 employee-hours per final result hour. You couldn't just get German at this rate: Berlin is one of the towns with the largest language diversities in Germany. This would give you a price of €64.35 per result hour. You'd have to pay €64k for 1000 hours of validated training data, and 128k for the 2 thousand hour figure of currently achieved data. These €128k are probably on the same order of magnitude that Mozilla pays for the project (employee time to design, build, and run it), and if the project scales it will look even better. From a business POV, going open source was thus a great idea. To put the 2000 hours into comparison, the deepspeech 2 paper [1] used 10k hour datasets (per language, while the 2k hours are distributed amongst multiple languages) [1]. Record holder is probably Amazon with 1 million hours (although it's unlabeled) [2]. It's possible though that future breakthroughs will remove the need for tons of training data. So even if the restricted amount of training data can't create practical models in niche languages for now, it might very well be able to in the future. [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.02595.pdf [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.01624.pdf
gok
Neutral mention · rule
But these results are about in line with other CTC systems. The original Baidu paper [1] had 7.89% with original Deep Speech and 5.33% with "Deep Speech 2" where they threw more complicated networks at it and added another 11K hours of external speech traingin data. [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1512.02595v1.pdf

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