Joint Beamforming and Speaker-Attributed ASR for Real Distant-Microphone Meeting Transcription

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Hauptverfasser: Cui, Can, Sheikh, Imran Ahamad, Sadeghi, Mostafa, Vincent, Emmanuel
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Cui, Can
Sheikh, Imran Ahamad
Sadeghi, Mostafa
Vincent, Emmanuel
author_facet Cui, Can
Sheikh, Imran Ahamad
Sadeghi, Mostafa
Vincent, Emmanuel
contents Distant-microphone meeting transcription is a challenging task. State-of-the-art end-to-end speaker-attributed automatic speech recognition (SA-ASR) architectures lack a multichannel noise and reverberation reduction front-end, which limits their performance. In this paper, we introduce a joint beamforming and SA-ASR approach for real meeting transcription. We first describe a data alignment and augmentation method to pretrain a neural beamformer on real meeting data. We then compare fixed, hybrid, and fully neural beamformers as front-ends to the SA-ASR model. Finally, we jointly optimize the fully neural beamformer and the SA-ASR model. Experiments on the real AMI corpus show that, while state-of-the-art multi-frame cross-channel attention based channel fusion fails to improve ASR performance, fine-tuning SA-ASR on the fixed beamformer's output and jointly fine-tuning SA-ASR with the neural beamformer reduce the word error rate by 8% and 9% relative, respectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_21849
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Joint Beamforming and Speaker-Attributed ASR for Real Distant-Microphone Meeting Transcription
Cui, Can
Sheikh, Imran Ahamad
Sadeghi, Mostafa
Vincent, Emmanuel
Computation and Language
Distant-microphone meeting transcription is a challenging task. State-of-the-art end-to-end speaker-attributed automatic speech recognition (SA-ASR) architectures lack a multichannel noise and reverberation reduction front-end, which limits their performance. In this paper, we introduce a joint beamforming and SA-ASR approach for real meeting transcription. We first describe a data alignment and augmentation method to pretrain a neural beamformer on real meeting data. We then compare fixed, hybrid, and fully neural beamformers as front-ends to the SA-ASR model. Finally, we jointly optimize the fully neural beamformer and the SA-ASR model. Experiments on the real AMI corpus show that, while state-of-the-art multi-frame cross-channel attention based channel fusion fails to improve ASR performance, fine-tuning SA-ASR on the fixed beamformer's output and jointly fine-tuning SA-ASR with the neural beamformer reduce the word error rate by 8% and 9% relative, respectively.
title Joint Beamforming and Speaker-Attributed ASR for Real Distant-Microphone Meeting Transcription
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.21849