Failing Forward: Improving Generative Error Correction for ASR with Synthetic Data and Retrieval Augmentation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ghosh, Sreyan, Rasooli, Mohammad Sadegh, Levit, Michael, Wang, Peidong, Xue, Jian, Manocha, Dinesh, Li, Jinyu
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Ghosh, Sreyan
Rasooli, Mohammad Sadegh
Levit, Michael
Wang, Peidong
Xue, Jian
Manocha, Dinesh
Li, Jinyu
author_facet Ghosh, Sreyan
Rasooli, Mohammad Sadegh
Levit, Michael
Wang, Peidong
Xue, Jian
Manocha, Dinesh
Li, Jinyu
contents Generative Error Correction (GEC) has emerged as a powerful post-processing method to enhance the performance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. However, we show that GEC models struggle to generalize beyond the specific types of errors encountered during training, limiting their ability to correct new, unseen errors at test time, particularly in out-of-domain (OOD) scenarios. This phenomenon amplifies with named entities (NEs), where, in addition to insufficient contextual information or knowledge about the NEs, novel NEs keep emerging. To address these issues, we propose DARAG (Data- and Retrieval-Augmented Generative Error Correction), a novel approach designed to improve GEC for ASR in in-domain (ID) and OOD scenarios. We augment the GEC training dataset with synthetic data generated by prompting LLMs and text-to-speech models, thereby simulating additional errors from which the model can learn. For OOD scenarios, we simulate test-time errors from new domains similarly and in an unsupervised fashion. Additionally, to better handle named entities, we introduce retrieval-augmented correction by augmenting the input with entities retrieved from a database. Our approach is simple, scalable, and both domain- and language-agnostic. We experiment on multiple datasets and settings, showing that DARAG outperforms all our baselines, achieving 8\% -- 30\% relative WER improvements in ID and 10\% -- 33\% improvements in OOD settings.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_13198
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Failing Forward: Improving Generative Error Correction for ASR with Synthetic Data and Retrieval Augmentation
Ghosh, Sreyan
Rasooli, Mohammad Sadegh
Levit, Michael
Wang, Peidong
Xue, Jian
Manocha, Dinesh
Li, Jinyu
Audio and Speech Processing
Computation and Language
Sound
Generative Error Correction (GEC) has emerged as a powerful post-processing method to enhance the performance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. However, we show that GEC models struggle to generalize beyond the specific types of errors encountered during training, limiting their ability to correct new, unseen errors at test time, particularly in out-of-domain (OOD) scenarios. This phenomenon amplifies with named entities (NEs), where, in addition to insufficient contextual information or knowledge about the NEs, novel NEs keep emerging. To address these issues, we propose DARAG (Data- and Retrieval-Augmented Generative Error Correction), a novel approach designed to improve GEC for ASR in in-domain (ID) and OOD scenarios. We augment the GEC training dataset with synthetic data generated by prompting LLMs and text-to-speech models, thereby simulating additional errors from which the model can learn. For OOD scenarios, we simulate test-time errors from new domains similarly and in an unsupervised fashion. Additionally, to better handle named entities, we introduce retrieval-augmented correction by augmenting the input with entities retrieved from a database. Our approach is simple, scalable, and both domain- and language-agnostic. We experiment on multiple datasets and settings, showing that DARAG outperforms all our baselines, achieving 8\% -- 30\% relative WER improvements in ID and 10\% -- 33\% improvements in OOD settings.
title Failing Forward: Improving Generative Error Correction for ASR with Synthetic Data and Retrieval Augmentation
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Computation and Language
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.13198