WCTC-Biasing: Retraining-free Contextual Biasing ASR with Wildcard CTC-based Keyword Spotting and Inter-layer Biasing

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Nakagome, Yu, Hentschel, Michael
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Nakagome, Yu
Hentschel, Michael
author_facet Nakagome, Yu
Hentschel, Michael
contents Despite recent advances in end-to-end speech recognition methods, the output tends to be biased to the training data's vocabulary, resulting in inaccurate recognition of proper nouns and other unknown terms. To address this issue, we propose a method to improve recognition accuracy of such rare words in CTC-based models without additional training or text-to-speech systems. Specifically, keyword spotting is performed using acoustic features of intermediate layers during inference, and a bias is applied to the subsequent layers of the acoustic model for detected keywords. For keyword detection, we adopt a wildcard CTC that is both fast and tolerant of ambiguous matches, allowing flexible handling of words that are difficult to match strictly. Since this method does not require retraining of existing models, it can be easily applied to even large-scale models. In experiments on Japanese speech recognition, the proposed method achieved a 29% improvement in the F1 score for unknown words.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_01263
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle WCTC-Biasing: Retraining-free Contextual Biasing ASR with Wildcard CTC-based Keyword Spotting and Inter-layer Biasing
Nakagome, Yu
Hentschel, Michael
Computation and Language
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
Despite recent advances in end-to-end speech recognition methods, the output tends to be biased to the training data's vocabulary, resulting in inaccurate recognition of proper nouns and other unknown terms. To address this issue, we propose a method to improve recognition accuracy of such rare words in CTC-based models without additional training or text-to-speech systems. Specifically, keyword spotting is performed using acoustic features of intermediate layers during inference, and a bias is applied to the subsequent layers of the acoustic model for detected keywords. For keyword detection, we adopt a wildcard CTC that is both fast and tolerant of ambiguous matches, allowing flexible handling of words that are difficult to match strictly. Since this method does not require retraining of existing models, it can be easily applied to even large-scale models. In experiments on Japanese speech recognition, the proposed method achieved a 29% improvement in the F1 score for unknown words.
title WCTC-Biasing: Retraining-free Contextual Biasing ASR with Wildcard CTC-based Keyword Spotting and Inter-layer Biasing
topic Computation and Language
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01263