Question: How are sentence embeddings incorporated into the speech recognition system?

Evidence:
raw_evidence: There exist many word/sentence embeddings which are publicly available. We can broadly classify them into two categories: (1) non-contextual word embeddings, and (2) contextual word embeddings. Non-contextual word embeddings, such as Word2Vec BIBREF1 , GloVe BIBREF39 , fastText BIBREF17 , maps each word independently on the context of the sentence where the word occur in. Although it is easy to use, it assumes that each word represents a single meaning which is not true in real-word. Contextualized word embeddings, sentence embeddings, such as deep contextualized word representations BIBREF20 , BERT BIBREF22 , encode the complex characteristics and meanings of words in various context by jointly training a bidirectional language model. The BERT model proposed a masked language model training approach enabling them to also learn good “sentence” representation in order to predict the masked word.
In this work, we explore both types of embeddings to learn conversational-context embeddings as illustrated in Figure 1 . The first method is to use word embeddings, fastText, to generate 300-dimensional embeddings from 10k-dimensional one-hot vector or distribution over words of each previous word and then merge into a single context vector, $e^k_{context}$ . Since we also consider multiple word/utterance history, we consider two simple ways to merge multiple embeddings (1) mean, and (2) concatenation. The second method is to use sentence embeddings, BERT. It is used to a generate single 786-dimensional sentence embedding from 10k-dimensional one-hot vector or distribution over previous words and then merge into a single context vector with two different merging methods. Since our A2W model uses a restricted vocabulary of 10k as our output units and which is different from the external embedding models, we need to handle out-of-vocabulary words. For fastText, words that are missing in the pretrained embeddings we map them to a random multivariate normal distribution with the mean as the sample mean and variance as the sample variance of the known words. For BERT, we use its provided tokenizer to generates byte pair encodings to handle OOV words.
Using this approach, we can obtain a more dense, informative, fixed-length vectors to encode conversational-context information, $e^k_{context}$ to be used in next $k$ -th utterance prediction.
We use contextual gating mechanism in our decoder network to combine the conversational-context embeddings with speech and word embeddings effectively. Our gating is contextual in the sense that multiple embeddings compute a gate value that is dependent on the context of multiple utterances that occur in a conversation. Using these contextual gates can be beneficial to decide how to weigh the different embeddings, conversational-context, word and speech embeddings. Rather than merely concatenating conversational-context embeddings BIBREF6 , contextual gating can achieve more improvement because its increased representational power using multiplicative interactions.
Figure 2 illustrates our proposed contextual gating mechanism. Let $e_w = e_w(y_{u-1})$ be our previous word embedding for a word $y_{u-1}$ , and let $e_s = e_s(x^k_{1:T})$ be a speech embedding for the acoustic features of current $k$ -th utterance $x^k_{1:T}$ and $e_c = e_c(s_{k-1-n:k-1})$ be our conversational-context embedding for $n$ -number of preceding utterances ${s_{k-1-n:k-1}}$ . Then using a gating mechanism:
$$g = \sigma (e_c, e_w, e_s)$$ (Eq. 15)
where $\sigma $ is a 1 hidden layer DNN with $\texttt {sigmoid}$ activation, the gated embedding $e$ is calcuated as
$$e = g \odot (e_c, e_w, e_s) \\ h = \text{LSTM}(e)$$ (Eq. 16)
and fed into the LSTM decoder hidden layer. The output of the decoder $h$ is then combined with conversational-context embedding $e_c$ again with a gating mechanism,
$$g = \sigma (e_C, h) \\ \hat{h} = g \odot (e_c, h)$$ (Eq. 17)
Then the next hidden layer takes these gated activations, $\hat{h}$ , and so on.

Answers:
BERT generates sentence embeddings that represent words in context. These sentence embeddings are merged into a single conversational-context vector that is used to calculate a gated embedding and is later combined with the output of the decoder h to provide the gated activations for the next hidden layer.