Title: Multitask Learning with CTC and Segmental CRF for Speech Recognition,
Abstract: Segmental conditional random fields (SCRFs) and connectionist temporal
classification (CTC) are two sequence labeling methods used for end-to-end
training of speech recognition models. Both models define a transcription
probability by marginalizing decisions about latent segmentation alternatives
to derive a sequence probability: the former uses a globally normalized joint
model of segment labels and durations, and the latter classifies each frame as
either an output symbol or a "continuation" of the previous label. In this
paper, we train a recognition model by optimizing an interpolation between the
SCRF and CTC losses, where the same recurrent neural network (RNN) encoder is
used for feature extraction for both outputs. We find that this multitask
objective improves recognition accuracy when decoding with either the SCRF or
CTC models. Additionally, we show that CTC can also be used to pretrain the RNN
encoder, which improves the convergence rate when learning the joint model.