Classification of causes of speech recognition errors using attention-based bidirectional long short-term memory and modulation spectrum

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of classifying four common utterance characteristics related to the utterance speed, which cause speech recognition errors. We previously proposed bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) as a classifier and the modulation spectrum as an acoustic feature. However, the performance of it is still insufficient, since BLSTM classified the utterance characteristics from the overall utterance, while most of the recognition errors resulted from utterance characteristics occur in only a small part of utterance. In this paper, we propose an approach to enhance classifier by using attention mechanism (attention-based BLSTM). Attention-based BLSTM enables the classifier to weight each frame according to its importance instead of directly measuring overall information from the speech. Furthermore, we investigate the correspondence of utterance characteristics to different modulation spectrum block lengths. To evaluate the performance of the proposed method, we conducted a classification experiment on Japanese conversational speeches with four different utterance characteristics: ‘fast’, ‘slow’, ‘filler’, and ‘stutter’. As a result, the proposed method improved the F-score by 0.033-0.129 compared with the previously proposed method using BLSTM. This result confirms the effectiveness of attention-based BLSTM in classifying cause of errors based on utterance characteristics.