Robust Spoken Language Understanding with Unsupervised ASR-Error Adaptation

Abstract

Robustness to errors produced by automatic speech recognition (ASR) is essential for Spoken Language Understanding (SLU). Traditional robust SLU typically needs ASR hypotheses with semantic annotations for training. However, semantic annotation is very expensive, and the corresponding ASR system may change frequently. Here, we propose a novel unsupervised ASR-error adaptation method, obviating the need of annotated ASR hypotheses. It only requires semantically annotated transcripts for the slot-tagging task and the transcripts paired with hypotheses for an input sentence reconstruction task. In this method, feature encoders which share part of the parameters are exploited to enforce the tasks in a similar feature space. Therefore, the transcript side slot-tagging model can be transferred to ASR hypotheses side easily. Experiments show that the proposed approach can yield significant improvement over strong baselines, and achieve performance very close to the oracle system.