Seminar Report

On

Advancements in Automatic Speech Recognition

(ASR) within Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Session
2023-2024

Ph.D.
In
Computer Science & Technology

Submitted
By
AYUSH BHARTI
Enrolment No.: 23/10/PC/009

Under the Supervision of

Prof. D. K. Lobiyal

School of Computer & System Sciences

Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Delhi, 110067
Introduction
In recent years, the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP) has witnessed
unprecedented advancements, revolutionising the way humans interact with technology.
NLP, the branch of artificial intelligence concerned with the interaction between computers
and human (natural) languages, has found applications in various domains such as virtual
assistants, machine translation, sentiment analysis, and more. One of the key components
enabling the progress in NLP is Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR).

ASR technology plays a pivotal role in bridging the gap between human language and
machine understanding by converting spoken language into text. Its applications range from
voice-activated virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa to dictation software and real-time
transcription services. As ASR systems continue to improve in accuracy and efficiency, they
are becoming indispensable tools for enabling seamless human-computer interaction.

Despite the significant progress made in ASR technology, there are still challenges and
limitations that hinder its full potential in NLP applications. These challenges include but are
not limited to dialectal variations, background noise, speaker accents, and understanding
conversational nuances. Addressing these challenges requires interdisciplinary research
efforts spanning linguistics, signal processing, machine learning, and cognitive science.

The process of ASR involves several steps: Acoustic Analysis, Feature Extraction, Acoustic
Modeling, Language Modeling, Decoding and Output.
ASR technology has evolved significantly in recent years, primarily due to advances in
machine learning, particularly deep learning. Deep neural networks, in particular, have
improved the accuracy of ASR systems by learning complex patterns directly from the
acoustic input data.

Figure 1. General Architecture of ASR [1]

Furthermore, this report emphasises the importance of developing ASR models that are not
only proficient in transcribing speech accurately but also capable of understanding the
semantic and contextual nuances inherent in natural language. Such advancements will
contribute to the development of more intuitive and intelligent NLP applications that can
comprehend, interpret, and respond to human language in a manner akin to human
communication.

Motivation
The motivation behind advancing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) within Natural
Language Processing (NLP) stems from the desire to create more intuitive and efficient
human-computer interfaces, enhance accessibility to information, and unlock new
opportunities for automation and productivity. Several key motivations drive the ongoing
research and development efforts in this field:

Improved Human-Computer Interaction: ASR technology enables more natural and

intuitive interactions between humans and machines. By allowing users to communicate with
devices using spoken language, ASR enhances user experience and accessibility,
particularly for individuals with disabilities or those who prefer hands-free interactions.

Increased Efficiency and Productivity: This improves efficiency in diverse domains such
as data entry, document creation, navigation, and information retrieval, saving time and
reducing cognitive load for users.

Enhanced Accessibility: ASR technology plays a crucial role in making information more
accessible to individuals with visual impairments or literacy challenges. By converting
spoken language into text, ASR facilitates access to digital content, including books,
documents, websites, and educational materials, thereby promoting inclusivity and equity.

Efficient Customer Service and Support: This enhances efficiency, reduces wait times,
and improves the overall customer experience.

Advancements in Multimodal Interfaces: Integrating ASR with other modalities such as

text and images enables the development of multimodal interfaces that can understand and
respond to user inputs in various formats. This opens up new possibilities for interaction in
domains such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and human-robot interaction.

Facilitating Language Translation and Multilingual Communication: ASR technology

plays a vital role in enabling real-time speech translation and multilingual communication. By
transcribing spoken language into text, ASR facilitates the automatic translation of
conversations, enabling cross-lingual communication in diverse settings such as
international business, diplomacy, and tourism.
Applications
ASR within NLP has a wide range of applications across various industries and domains.

ASR powers virtual assistants such as Siri, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa, allowing
users to interact with devices using natural language commands. Virtual assistants can
perform tasks like setting reminders, sending messages, making calls, playing music, and
providing information based on user queries.

ASR enables hands-free dictation and transcription of spoken language into text. This is
particularly useful in professions such as healthcare, legal, journalism, and education, where
accurate and efficient transcription of audio recordings is essential.

ASR powers a wide range of voice-controlled devices, including smart speakers, smart TVs,
and smart home appliances. Users can control these devices using voice commands to
perform tasks such as adjusting settings, playing media, and controlling home automation
systems.

ASR facilitates real-time speech translation by transcribing spoken language into text and
then translating it into another language.

ASR technology improves accessibility for individuals with disabilities by enabling

speech-to-text transcription and voice-controlled interfaces.

ASR technology powers voice search engines, enabling users to find information on the
internet using spoken queries. Voice search is widely used in web browsers, mobile
applications, and smart speakers for tasks like finding nearby businesses, checking weather
forecasts, or looking up facts.

ASR technology supports language learning and educational applications by providing

pronunciation feedback, transcribing lectures and discussions, and enabling interactive
language practice exercises.

Challenges
While Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology within Natural Language Processing
(NLP) has made significant advancements, it still faces several challenges that impact its
accuracy, robustness, and usability. Some of the key challenges include:

1. Variability in Speech Patterns: Speech exhibits considerable variability due to factors

such as accents, dialects, speech rate, intonation, and background noise. ASR systems
must effectively handle these variations to accurately transcribe spoken language.

2. Out-of-Vocabulary Words: ASR systems may struggle with words or phrases that are
not present in their vocabulary or training data. Handling out-of-vocabulary words is crucial
for accurately transcribing specialised terminology, proper nouns, and emerging vocabulary.
3. Ambiguity and Homophones: Speech may contain ambiguous phrases or homophones
(words that sound alike but have different meanings), leading to errors in transcription. ASR
systems must disambiguate such cases based on context to improve accuracy.

4. Lack of Context Awareness: ASR systems often lack sufficient context awareness,
leading to misinterpretation of ambiguous or context-dependent speech. Incorporating
contextual information from the conversation or user context can help improve transcription
accuracy.

5. Speaker Adaptation and Personalization: ASR systems may struggle to adapt to

individual speakers' voices, accents, and speaking styles, leading to reduced accuracy for
certain users. Personalising ASR models to individual speakers or user profiles can mitigate
this challenge.

6. Data Privacy and Security: ASR systems often rely on large amounts of training data,
raising concerns about data privacy and security. Protecting sensitive information contained
in speech data and ensuring compliance with data protection regulations are critical
considerations.

Child speech recognition

Child speech recognition presents unique challenges compared to adult speech recognition
due to several factors: [2]

Children's speech undergoes significant developmental changes as they grow, resulting in

variations in pronunciation, articulation, and vocabulary acquisition. ASR systems must
account for these developmental stages and adapt to the evolving speech patterns of
children.

Children may exhibit greater variability in articulation due to factors such as dental
development, motor skills, and speech disorders. ASR systems must handle this variability
while maintaining accuracy in transcription.

Children's voices have distinct acoustic characteristics, including higher pitch, shorter vocal
tract length, and greater variability in pitch and intensity. ASR systems must be robust to
these acoustic variations and adapt their models accordingly.

ASR systems may encounter challenges in adapting to individual children's voices, accents,
and speech styles, particularly in scenarios where multiple children are interacting with the
system. Personalised or speaker-adaptive models can help improve recognition accuracy.

Literature Survey
"Listen, Attend and Spell" by William Chan, Navdeep Jaitly, Quoc V. Le, and Oriol Vinyals.
This paper introduces an end-to-end neural network model for speech recognition that
integrates attention mechanisms, allowing the model to focus on relevant parts of the input
sequence during decoding. [3]
"Deep Speech: Scaling up end-to-end speech recognition" by Awni Hannun, Carl Case,
Jared Casper, Bryan Catanzaro, Greg Diamos, Erich Elsen, Ryan Prenger, Sanjeev
Satheesh, Shubho Sengupta, Adam Coates, and Andrew Y. Ng. The paper presents Deep
Speech, a deep learning-based ASR system that directly maps audio waveforms to text,
achieving state-of-the-art performance without the need for handcrafted features or
intermediate linguistic units. [4]

"Connectionist Temporal Classification: Labelling Unsegmented Sequence Data with

Recurrent Neural Networks" by Alex Graves, Santiago Fernandez, Faustino Gomez, and
Jürgen Schmidhuber. This seminal paper introduces Connectionist Temporal Classification
(CTC), a framework for training end-to-end sequence-to-sequence models such as those
used in ASR without the need for aligned input-output pairs during training. [5]

"WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio" by Aaron van den Oord, Sander Dieleman,
Heiga Zen, Karen Simonyan, Oriol Vinyals, Alex Graves, Nal Kalchbrenner, Andrew Senior,
and Koray Kavukcuoglu. While not specifically focused on ASR, this paper introduces
WaveNet, a deep generative model capable of generating high-fidelity audio waveforms
directly, which has implications for speech synthesis and potentially ASR pre-processing. [6]

"Transformer Transducer: A Streamable Speech Recognition Model with Transformer

Encoders and RNN-T Decoders" by Yi-Chiao Wu, Szu-Jui Chen, and Berlin Chen. This
paper introduces Transformer Transducer, a novel architecture for ASR that combines the
benefits of transformer-based encoders with the Recurrent Neural Network Transducer
(RNN-T) decoding framework, achieving state-of-the-art performance on various benchmark
datasets. [7]

"Sequence-to-Sequence Speech Recognition with Time-Depth Separable Convolutions" by

Jan Chorowski, Ron J. Weiss, Samy Bengio, and Navdeep Jaitly. The paper proposes a
sequence-to-sequence ASR model that employs time-depth separable convolutions, which
reduce the computational cost of convolutions in the model while maintaining performance.
[8]

Conclusion
ASR systems have advanced significantly, driven by innovations in machine learning, deep
learning, and computational linguistics. These systems play a crucial role in enabling
seamless communication between humans and machines, facilitating tasks such as virtual
assistants, dictation software, voice search, customer service automation, language
translation, and more.
Despite the progress made, ASR within NLP continues to face challenges such as variability
in speech patterns, out-of-vocabulary words, ambiguity, lack of context awareness, and
adverse environmental conditions. Addressing these challenges requires interdisciplinary
research efforts and ongoing advancements in acoustic modelling, language modelling,
noise robustness, speaker adaptation, and personalised modelling.
ASR within NLP stands at the forefront of technological innovation, offering transformative
capabilities that enhance accessibility, productivity, and user experience in today's
interconnected world.
References
1. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323470605_Automatic_Speech_Recognitio
n_on_Spontaneous_Interview_Speech

2. Usha, G.P., Alex, J.S.R. Speech assessment tool methods for speech impaired
children: a systematic literature review on the state-of-the-art in Speech impairment
analysis. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 35021–35058 (2023).

3. Chan, W., Jaitly, N., Le, Q. V., & Vinyals, O. (2016). Listen, Attend and Spell. In
International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR).

4. Hannun, A., Case, C., Casper, J., Catanzaro, B., Diamos, G., Elsen, E., ... & Ng, A.
Y. (2014). Deep Speech: Scaling up end-to-end speech recognition. arXiv preprint
arXiv:1412.5567.

5. Graves, A., Fernández, S., Gomez, F., & Schmidhuber, J. (2006). Connectionist
Temporal Classification: Labelling Unsegmented Sequence Data with Recurrent
Neural Networks. In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Machine
Learning (ICML).

6. van den Oord, A., Dieleman, S., Zen, H., Simonyan, K., Vinyals, O., Graves, A., ... &
Kavukcuoglu, K. (2016). WaveNet: A Generative Model for Raw Audio. arXiv preprint
arXiv:1609.03499.

7. Wu, Y. C., Chen, S. J., & Chen, B. (2021). Transformer Transducer: A Streamable
Speech Recognition Model with Transformer Encoders and RNN-T Decoders. arXiv
preprint arXiv:2109.07927.
8. Chorowski, J., Weiss, R. J., Bengio, S., & Jaitly, N. (2015). Sequence-to-Sequence
Speech Recognition with Time-Depth Separable Convolutions. In Advances in Neural
Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).

9. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speech_recognition

10. https://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2021/01/introduction-to-automatic-speech-reco
gnition-and-natural-language-processing/