Multi-Encoder-Decoder Transformer for Code-Switching Speech Recognition

Abstract

Code-switching (CS) occurs when a speaker alternates words of two or more languages within a single sentence or across sentences.Automatic speech recognition (ASR) of CS speech has to deal with two or more languages at the same time.In this study, we propose a Transformer-based architecture with two symmetric language-specific encoders to capture the individual language attributes, that improve the acoustic representation of each language.These representations are combined using a language-specific multi-head attention mechanism in the decoder module.Each encoder and its corresponding attention module in the decoder are pre-trained using a large monolingual corpus aiming to alleviate the impact of limited CS training data.We call such a network a multi-encoder-decoder (MED) architecture.Experiments on the SEAME corpus show that the proposed MED architecture achieves 10.2% and 10.8% relative error rate reduction on the CS evaluation sets with Mandarin and English as the matrix language respectively.