Contextual Biasing to Improve Domain-specific Custom Vocabulary Audio Transcription without Explicit Fine-Tuning of Whisper Model

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Autori principali: Lall, Vishakha, Liu, Yisi
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Lall, Vishakha
Liu, Yisi
author_facet Lall, Vishakha
Liu, Yisi
contents OpenAI's Whisper Automated Speech Recognition model excels in generalizing across diverse datasets and domains. However, this broad adaptability can lead to diminished performance in tasks requiring recognition of specific vocabularies. Addressing this challenge typically involves fine-tuning the model, which demands extensive labeled audio data that is often difficult to acquire and unavailable for specific domains. In this study, we propose a method to enhance transcription accuracy without explicit fine-tuning or altering model parameters, using a relatively small training dataset. Our method leverages contextual biasing, to direct Whisper model's output towards a specific vocabulary by integrating a neural-symbolic prefix tree structure to guide the model's transcription output. To validate our approach, we conducted experiments using a validation dataset comprising maritime data collected within a simulated training environment. A comparison between the original Whisper models of varying parameter sizes and our biased model revealed a notable reduction in transcription word error rate and enhanced performance of downstream applications. Our findings suggest that this methodology holds promise for improving speech-to-text translation performance in domains characterized by limited vocabularies.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_18363
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Contextual Biasing to Improve Domain-specific Custom Vocabulary Audio Transcription without Explicit Fine-Tuning of Whisper Model
Lall, Vishakha
Liu, Yisi
Artificial Intelligence
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
OpenAI's Whisper Automated Speech Recognition model excels in generalizing across diverse datasets and domains. However, this broad adaptability can lead to diminished performance in tasks requiring recognition of specific vocabularies. Addressing this challenge typically involves fine-tuning the model, which demands extensive labeled audio data that is often difficult to acquire and unavailable for specific domains. In this study, we propose a method to enhance transcription accuracy without explicit fine-tuning or altering model parameters, using a relatively small training dataset. Our method leverages contextual biasing, to direct Whisper model's output towards a specific vocabulary by integrating a neural-symbolic prefix tree structure to guide the model's transcription output. To validate our approach, we conducted experiments using a validation dataset comprising maritime data collected within a simulated training environment. A comparison between the original Whisper models of varying parameter sizes and our biased model revealed a notable reduction in transcription word error rate and enhanced performance of downstream applications. Our findings suggest that this methodology holds promise for improving speech-to-text translation performance in domains characterized by limited vocabularies.
title Contextual Biasing to Improve Domain-specific Custom Vocabulary Audio Transcription without Explicit Fine-Tuning of Whisper Model
topic Artificial Intelligence
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18363