Question: How do they pre-train an ASR encoder?
Evidence: Speech-to-Text translation (ST) is essential for a wide range of scenarios: for example in emergency calls, where agents have to respond emergent requests in a foreign language BIBREF0; or in online courses, where audiences and speakers use different languages BIBREF1. To tackle this problem, existing approaches can be categorized into cascaded method BIBREF2, BIBREF3, where a machine translation (MT) model translates outputs of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system into target language, and end-to-end method BIBREF4, BIBREF5, where a single model learns acoustic frames to target word sequence mappings in one step towards the final objective of interest. Although the cascaded model remains the dominant approach due to its better performance, the end-to-end method becomes more and more popular because it has lower latency by avoiding inferences with two models and rectifies the error propagation in theory.
Since it is hard to obtain a large-scale ST dataset, multi-task learning BIBREF5, BIBREF6 and pre-training techniques BIBREF7 have been applied to end-to-end ST model to leverage large-scale datasets of ASR and MT. A common practice is to pre-train two encoder-decoder models for ASR and MT respectively, and then initialize the ST model with the encoder of the ASR model and the decoder of the MT model. Subsequently, the ST model is optimized with the multi-task learning by weighing the losses of ASR, MT, and ST. This approach, however, causes a huge gap between pre-training and fine-tuning, which are summarized into three folds:
Subnet Waste: The ST system just reuses the ASR encoder and the MT decoder, while discards other pre-trained subnets, such as the MT encoder. Consequently, valuable semantic information captured by the MT encoder cannot be inherited by the final ST system.
Role Mismatch: The speech encoder plays different roles in pre-training and fine-tuning. The encoder is a pure acoustic model in pre-training, while it has to extract semantic and linguistic features additionally in fine-tuning, which significantly increases the learning difficulty.
Non-pre-trained Attention Module: Previous work BIBREF6 trains attention modules for ASR, MT and ST respectively, hence, the attention module of ST does not benefit from the pre-training.
To address these issues, we propose a Tandem Connectionist Encoding Network (TCEN), which is able to reuse all subnets in pre-training, keep the roles of subnets consistent, and pre-train the attention module. Concretely, the TCEN consists of three components, a speech encoder, a text encoder, and a target text decoder. Different from the previous work that pre-trains an encoder-decoder based ASR model, we only pre-train an ASR encoder by optimizing the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) BIBREF8 objective function. In this way, the additional decoder of ASR is not required while keeping the ability to read acoustic features into the source language space by the speech encoder. Besides, the text encoder and decoder can be pre-trained on a large MT dataset. After that, we employ common used multi-task learning method to jointly learn ASR, MT and ST tasks.
Compared to prior works, the encoder of TCEN is a concatenation of an ASR encoder and an MT encoder and our model does not have an ASR decoder, so the subnet waste issue is solved. Furthermore, the two encoders work at tandem, disentangling acoustic feature extraction and linguistic feature extraction, ensuring the role consistency between pre-training and fine-tuning. Moreover, we reuse the pre-trained MT attention module in ST, so we can leverage the alignment information learned in pre-training.
Since the text encoder consumes word embeddings of plausible texts in MT task but uses speech encoder outputs in ST task, another question is how one guarantees the speech encoder outputs are consistent with the word embeddings. We further modify our model to achieve semantic consistency and length consistency. Specifically, (1) the projection matrix at the CTC classification layer for ASR is shared with the word embedding matrix, ensuring that they are mapped to the same latent space, and (2) the length of the speech encoder output is proportional to the length of the input frame, so it is much longer than a natural sentence. To bridge the length gap, source sentences in MT are lengthened by adding word repetitions and blank tokens to mimic the CTC output sequences.
We conduct comprehensive experiments on the IWSLT18 speech translation benchmark BIBREF1, demonstrating the effectiveness of each component. Our model is significantly better than previous methods by 3.6 and 2.2 BLEU scores for the subword-level decoding and character-level decoding strategies, respectively.
Our contributions are three-folds: 1) we shed light on why previous ST models cannot sufficiently utilize the knowledge learned from the pre-training process; 2) we propose a new ST model, which alleviates shortcomings in existing methods; and 3) we empirically evaluate the proposed model on a large-scale public dataset.
Different from the previous work that pre-trains an encoder-decoder based ASR model, we only pre-train an ASR encoder by optimizing the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) (Graves et al. 2006) objective function.
Answer: By optimizing the Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) (Graves et al. 2006) objective function.