Improving Transducer-Based Spoken Language Understanding with Self-Conditioned CTC and Knowledge Transfer

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Hauptverfasser: Sunder, Vishal, Fosler-Lussier, Eric
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Sunder, Vishal
Fosler-Lussier, Eric
author_facet Sunder, Vishal
Fosler-Lussier, Eric
contents In this paper, we propose to improve end-to-end (E2E) spoken language understand (SLU) in an RNN transducer model (RNN-T) by incorporating a joint self-conditioned CTC automatic speech recognition (ASR) objective. Our proposed model is akin to an E2E differentiable cascaded model which performs ASR and SLU sequentially and we ensure that the SLU task is conditioned on the ASR task by having CTC self conditioning. This novel joint modeling of ASR and SLU improves SLU performance significantly over just using SLU optimization. We further improve the performance by aligning the acoustic embeddings of this model with the semantically richer BERT model. Our proposed knowledge transfer strategy makes use of a bag-of-entity prediction layer on the aligned embeddings and the output of this is used to condition the RNN-T based SLU decoding. These techniques show significant improvement over several strong baselines and can perform at par with large models like Whisper with significantly fewer parameters.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_01936
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving Transducer-Based Spoken Language Understanding with Self-Conditioned CTC and Knowledge Transfer
Sunder, Vishal
Fosler-Lussier, Eric
Machine Learning
In this paper, we propose to improve end-to-end (E2E) spoken language understand (SLU) in an RNN transducer model (RNN-T) by incorporating a joint self-conditioned CTC automatic speech recognition (ASR) objective. Our proposed model is akin to an E2E differentiable cascaded model which performs ASR and SLU sequentially and we ensure that the SLU task is conditioned on the ASR task by having CTC self conditioning. This novel joint modeling of ASR and SLU improves SLU performance significantly over just using SLU optimization. We further improve the performance by aligning the acoustic embeddings of this model with the semantically richer BERT model. Our proposed knowledge transfer strategy makes use of a bag-of-entity prediction layer on the aligned embeddings and the output of this is used to condition the RNN-T based SLU decoding. These techniques show significant improvement over several strong baselines and can perform at par with large models like Whisper with significantly fewer parameters.
title Improving Transducer-Based Spoken Language Understanding with Self-Conditioned CTC and Knowledge Transfer
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.01936