Title: Advances in Joint CTC-Attention based End-to-End Speech Recognition with a Deep CNN Encoder and RNN-LM,
Abstract: We present a state-of-the-art end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)
model. We learn to listen and write characters with a joint Connectionist
Temporal Classification (CTC) and attention-based encoder-decoder network. The
encoder is a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based on the VGG network.
The CTC network sits on top of the encoder and is jointly trained with the
attention-based decoder. During the beam search process, we combine the CTC
predictions, the attention-based decoder predictions and a separately trained
LSTM language model. We achieve a 5-10\% error reduction compared to prior
systems on spontaneous Japanese and Chinese speech, and our end-to-end model
beats out traditional hybrid ASR systems.