The RWTH ASR System for TED-LIUM Release 2: Improving Hybrid HMM with SpecAugment
Journal: arXiv (Cornell University)
Year: 2020

We present a complete training pipeline to build a state-of-the-art hybrid HMM-based ASR system on the 2nd release of the TED-LIUM corpus. Data augmentation using SpecAugment is successfully applied to improve performance on top of our best SAT model using i-vectors. By investigating the effect of different maskings, we achieve improvements from SpecAugment on hybrid HMM models without increasing model size and training time. A subsequent sMBR training is applied to fine-tune the final acoustic