Title: Analyzing Hidden Representations in End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition Systems,
Abstract: Neural models have become ubiquitous in automatic speech recognition systems.
While neural networks are typically used as acoustic models in more complex
systems, recent studies have explored end-to-end speech recognition systems
based on neural networks, which can be trained to directly predict text from
input acoustic features. Although such systems are conceptually elegant and
simpler than traditional systems, it is less obvious how to interpret the
trained models. In this work, we analyze the speech representations learned by
a deep end-to-end model that is based on convolutional and recurrent layers,
and trained with a connectionist temporal classification (CTC) loss. We use a
pre-trained model to generate frame-level features which are given to a
classifier that is trained on frame classification into phones. We evaluate
representations from different layers of the deep model and compare their
quality for predicting phone labels. Our experiments shed light on important
aspects of the end-to-end model such as layer depth, model complexity, and
other design choices.