Large vocabulary ASR · 0 E ASR Lecture 9 Large vocabulary ASR10. Viterbi algorithm: connected word...

Large vocabulary ASR

Peter Bell

Automatic Speech Recognition – ASR Lecture 910 February 2020

ASR Lecture 9 Large vocabulary ASR 1

HMM Speech Recognition

AcousticModel

LanguageModel

Recorded Speech Decoded Text (Transcription)

TrainingData

SignalAnalysis

SearchSpace


The Search Problem in ASR

Find the most probable word sequence W = w1,w2, . . . ,wM

given the acoustic observations X = x1, x2, . . . , xT :

W = arg maxW

P(W |X)

= arg maxW

p(X |W )︸︷︷︸acoustic model

P(W )︸︷︷︸language model

Use pronuniciation knowledge to construct HMMs for allpossible words

Finding the most probable state sequence allows us to recoverthe most probable word sequence

Viterbi decoding is an efficient way of finding the mostprobable state sequence, but even this is infeasible as thevocabulary gets very large or when a stronger language modelis used


Recap: the word HMM

r1 r2 r3 ai_1 ai_2 ai_3r_1 r_2 r_3 t_1 t_2 t_3

/r/ /ai/ /t/“right”

HMM naturally generates an alignment between hidden states andobservation sequence


Viterbi algorithm for state alignmentr_1

r_2

r_3

0

x1 …

state

time

Eai_1

ai_2

ai_3

t_1

t_2

t_3

Viterbi algorithm finds the best path through the trellis – givingthe highest p(X ,Q).


Simplified version with one state per phone

rai

t0

E

x1 x2

state

time

x3 x4 x5 x6 x7


Isolated word recognition

r1 r2 r3r ai t

“right”

r1 r2 r3t eh n

“ten”

r1 r2 r3p ih n

“pin”

E0


Viterbi algorithm: isolated word recognition

rai

t0

x1 x2

state

time

x3 x4 x5 x6 x7

teh

n

E

teh

n


Connected word recognition

Even worse when recognising connected words...

The number of words in the utterance is not known

Word boundaries are not known: any of the V words maypotentially start at each frame.



r1 r2 r3r ai t

r1 r2 r3t eh n

r1 r2 r3p ih n

E0


Viterbi algorithm: connected word recognition

rai

t0

x1 x2

state

time

x3 x4 x5 x6 x7

teh

nE

pih

n

Add transitions betweenall word-final andword-initial states



rai

t0

x1 x2

state

time

x3 x4 x5 x6 x7

teh

nE

pih

n

Viterbi decoding finds thebest word sequence

BUT: have to consider|V |2 inter-word transitionsat every time step



rai

t0

x1 x2

state

time

x3 x4 x5 x6 x7

teh

nE

pih

n


Integrating the language model

So far we’ve estimated HMM transition probabilities fromaudio data, as part of the acoustic model

Transitions between words rightarrow use a language model

n-gram language model:

p(wi |hi ) = p(wi |wi−n, . . .wi−1)

Integrate the language model directly in the Viterbi search


Incorporating a bigram language model

r1 r2 r3r ai t

r1 r2 r3t eh n

r1 r2 r3p ih n

P(ten | pin)

P(pin | pin)

P(pin | right)


Incorporating a bigram language model

rai

t0

x1 x2

state

time

x3 x4 x5 x6 x7

teh

nE

pih

n

P(ten | pin)

P(pin | pin)

P(right | pin)


Incorporating a trigram language model

tair

r1 r2 r3t eh n

r1 r2 r3p ih n

r1 r2 r3r ai t

r1 r2 r3t eh n

r1 r2 r3p ih n

r1 r2 r3r ai t

r1 r2 r3t eh n

r1 r2 r3p ih n

P(pin | ten pin)

P(pin | pin pin)

P(ten | pin pin)

P(right | pin ten)

P(right | ten ten)

P(right | ten right )

Need to duplicate HMMstates to incorporateextended word history


Computational Issues

Viterbi decoding performs an exact search in an efficientmanner

But exact search is not possible for large vocabulary tasks

Long-span language models and the use of cross-wordtriphones greatly increase the size of the search space

Solutions:

Beam search (prune low probability hypotheses)Tree structured lexiconsLanguage model look-aheadDynamic search structuresMultipass search (→ two-stage decoding)Best-first search (→ stack decoding / A∗ search)

An alternative approach: Weighted Finite State Transducers(WFST)


Computational Issues

Viterbi decoding performs an exact search in an efficientmanner

But exact search is not possible for large vocabulary tasks

Long-span language models and the use of cross-wordtriphones greatly increase the size of the search space

Solutions:

Beam search (prune low probability hypotheses)Tree structured lexiconsLanguage model look-aheadDynamic search structuresMultipass search (→ two-stage decoding)Best-first search (→ stack decoding / A∗ search)

An alternative approach: Weighted Finite State Transducers(WFST)


Pruning

rai

t0

x1 x2

state

time

x3 x4 x5 x6 x7

teh

nE

pih

n

During Viterbi decoding,don’t propagate tokenswhose probability falls acertain amount below thecurrent best path

Result is only anapproximation to the bestpath


Tree-structured lexicon

s

ey

t

p

ee

eh

k

ch

l

aw

k

eh

l

0

say

speak

speech

spell

talk

tell

Figure adapted from Ortmans & Ney, “The time-conditioned approach in dynamic programming search for LVCSR”


Tree-structured lexicon

sp

ee

x1 x2

state

time

x3 x4 x5 x6 x7

kch

ehl

ey

spell

speech

say

speak

Reduces the number ofstate transitioncomputations

For clarity, not all the connections are shown


Language model look-ahead

Aim to make pruning more efficient

In tree-structured decoding, look ahead to find out the bestLM score for any words further down the tree

This information can be pre-computed and stored at eachnode in the tree

States in the tree are pruned early if we know that none of thepossibilities will receive good enough probabilities from theLM.


Weighted Finite State Transducers

Weighted finite state automaton that transduces an inputsequence to an output sequence (Mohri et al 2008)

States connected by transitions. Each transition has

input labeloutput labelweight

Weights use the log semi-ring or tropical semi-ring – withoperations that correspond to multiplication and addition ofprobabilities

There is a single start state. Any state can optionally be afinal state (with a weight)

Used by Kaldi


Weighted Finite State AcceptorsSpringer Handbook on Speech Processing and Speech Communication 3

0 1using/1

2data/0.66

3

intuition/0.33

4

is/15

better/0.7

worse/0.3

(a)

are/0.5

is/0.5

(b)

0 1d/1 2ey/0.5ae/0.5

3t/0.3dx/0.7

4ax/1

(c)0

d1

1d1

d2

2d2

d3

3d3

Figure 1: Weighted finite-state acceptor examples. By convention, the states are represented by circles andmarked with their unique number. The initial state is represented by a bold circle, final states by doublecircles. The label l and weight w of a transition are marked on the corresponding directed arc by l/w. Whenexplicitly shown, the final weight w of a final state f is marked by f/w.

quite similar to a weighted acceptor except that it hasan input label, an output label and a weight on eachof its transitions. The examples in Figure 2 encode(a superset of) the information in the WFSAs of Fig-ure 1(a)-(b) as WFSTs. Figure 2(a) represents thesame language model as Figure 1(a) by giving eachtransition identical input and output labels. This addsno new information, but is a convenient way we useoften to treat acceptors and transducers uniformly.

Figure 2(b) represents a toy pronunciation lexi-con as a mapping from phone strings to words inthe lexicon, in this example data and dew, withprobabilities representing the likelihoods of alterna-tive pronunciations. It transduces a phone string thatcan be read along a path from the start state to a fi-nal state to a word string with a particular weight.The word corresponding to a pronunciation is out-put by the transition that consumes the first phonefor that pronunciation. The transitions that consumethe remaining phones output no further symbols, in-dicated by the null symbol ϵ as the transition’s outputlabel. In general, an ϵ input label marks a transitionthat consumes no input, and an ϵ output label marksa transition that produces no output.

This transducer has more information than theWFSA in Figure 1(b). Since words are encoded by

the output label, it is possible to combine the pronun-ciation transducers for more than one word withoutlosing word identity. Similarly, HMM structures ofthe form given in Figure 1(c) can be combined intoa single transducer that preserves phone model iden-tity. This illustrates the key advantage of a transducerover an acceptor: the transducer can represent a rela-tionship between two levels of representation, for in-stance between phones and words or between HMMsand context-independent phones. More precisely, atransducer specifies a binary relation between strings:two strings are in the relation when there is a pathfrom an initial to a final state in the transducer thathas the first string as the sequence of input labelsalong the path, and the second string as the sequenceof output labels along the path (ϵ symbols are leftout in both input and output). In general, this is arelation rather than a function since the same inputstring might be transduced to different strings alongtwo distinct paths. For a weighted transducer, eachstring pair is also associated with a weight.

We rely on a common set of weighted trans-ducer operations to combine, optimize, search andprune them [Mohri et al., 2000]. Each operationimplements a single, well-defined function that hasits foundations in the mathematical theory of ratio-

Springer Handbook on Speech Processing and Speech Communication 3

0 1using/1

2data/0.66

3

intuition/0.33

4

is/15

better/0.7

worse/0.3

(a)

are/0.5

is/0.5

(b)

0 1d/1 2ey/0.5ae/0.5

3t/0.3dx/0.7

4ax/1

(c)0

d1

1d1

d2

2d2

d3

3d3









Acceptor


0 1using/1

2data/0.66

3

intuition/0.33

4

is/15

better/0.7

worse/0.3

(a)

are/0.5

is/0.5

(b)

0 1d/1 2ey/0.5ae/0.5

3t/0.3dx/0.7

4ax/1

(c)0

d1

1d1

d2

2d2

d3

3d3







Transducer


(a)

0 1using:using/1

2data:data/0.66

3intuition:intuition/0.33

4

is:is/0.5

are:are/0.5

is:is/1

5better:better/0.7

worse:worse/0.3

(b)

0

1d:data/1

5

d:dew/1

2ey:ε/0.5

ae:ε/0.5

6uw:ε/1

3t:ε/0.3

dx:ε/0.74

ax: ε /1

Figure 2: Weighted finite-state transducer examples. These are similar to the weighted acceptors in Figure 1except output labels are introduced on each transition. The input label i, the output label o, and weight w ofa transition are marked on the corresponding directed arc by i : o/w.

nal power series [Salomaa and Soittola, 1978, Bers-tel and Reutenauer, 1988, Kuich and Salomaa, 1986].Many of those operations are the weighted trans-ducer generalizations of classical algorithms for un-weighted acceptors. We have brought together thoseand a variety of auxiliary operations in a comprehen-sive weighted finite-state machine software library(FsmLib) available for non-commercial use from theAT&T Labs – ResearchWeb site [Mohri et al., 2000].

Basic union, concatenation, and Kleene closureoperations combine transducers in parallel, in series,and with arbitrary repetition, respectively. Other op-erations convert transducers to acceptors by project-ing onto the input or output label set, find the bestor the n best paths in a weighted transducer, removeunreachable states and transitions, and sort acyclicautomata topologically.

Where possible, we provided lazy (also called on-demand) implementations of algorithms. Any finite-state object fsm can be accessed with the three mainmethods fsm.start(), fsm.final(state),and fsm.transitions(state) that return thestart state, the final weight of a state, and the transi-tions leaving a state, respectively. This interface canbe implemented for concrete automata in an obviousway: the methods simply return the requested infor-mation from a stored representation of the automa-

ton. However, the interface can also be given lazyimplementations. For example, the lazy union of twoautomata returns a new lazy fsm object. When theobject is first constructed, the lazy implementationjust initializes internal book-keeping data. It is onlywhen the interface methods request the start state, thefinal weights, or the transitions (and their destinationstates) leaving a state, that this information is actuallycomputed, and optionally cached inside the object forlater reuse. This approach has the advantage that ifonly a part of the result of an operation is needed (forexample in a pruned search), then the unused part isnever computed, saving time and space. We refer theinterested reader to the library documentation and anoverview of the library [Mohri et al., 2000] for fur-ther details on lazy finite-state objects.

We now discuss the key transducer operationsthat are used in our speech applications for modelcombination, redundant path removal, and size re-duction, respectively.

2.3. Composition

Composition is the transducer operation for com-bining different levels of representation. For in-stance, a pronunciation lexicon can be composedwith a word-level grammar to produce a phone-to-



Acceptor


0 1using/1

2data/0.66

3

intuition/0.33

4

is/15

better/0.7

worse/0.3

(a)

are/0.5

is/0.5

(b)

0 1d/1 2ey/0.5ae/0.5

3t/0.3dx/0.7

4ax/1

(c)0

d1

1d1

d2

2d2

d3

3d3







Transducer


(a)

0 1using:using/1

2data:data/0.66

3intuition:intuition/0.33

4

is:is/0.5

are:are/0.5

is:is/1

5better:better/0.7

worse:worse/0.3

(b)

0

1d:data/1

5

d:dew/1

2ey:ε/0.5

ae:ε/0.5

6uw:ε/1

3t:ε/0.3

dx:ε/0.74

ax: ε /1

Figure 2: Weighted finite-state transducer examples. These are similar to the weighted acceptors in Figure 1except output labels are introduced on each transition. The input label i, the output label o, and weight w ofa transition are marked on the corresponding directed arc by i : o/w.

nal power series [Salomaa and Soittola, 1978, Bers-tel and Reutenauer, 1988, Kuich and Salomaa, 1986].Many of those operations are the weighted trans-ducer generalizations of classical algorithms for un-weighted acceptors. We have brought together thoseand a variety of auxiliary operations in a comprehen-sive weighted finite-state machine software library(FsmLib) available for non-commercial use from theAT&T Labs – ResearchWeb site [Mohri et al., 2000].

Basic union, concatenation, and Kleene closureoperations combine transducers in parallel, in series,and with arbitrary repetition, respectively. Other op-erations convert transducers to acceptors by project-ing onto the input or output label set, find the bestor the n best paths in a weighted transducer, removeunreachable states and transitions, and sort acyclicautomata topologically.

Where possible, we provided lazy (also called on-demand) implementations of algorithms. Any finite-state object fsm can be accessed with the three mainmethods fsm.start(), fsm.final(state),and fsm.transitions(state) that return thestart state, the final weight of a state, and the transi-tions leaving a state, respectively. This interface canbe implemented for concrete automata in an obviousway: the methods simply return the requested infor-mation from a stored representation of the automa-

ton. However, the interface can also be given lazyimplementations. For example, the lazy union of twoautomata returns a new lazy fsm object. When theobject is first constructed, the lazy implementationjust initializes internal book-keeping data. It is onlywhen the interface methods request the start state, thefinal weights, or the transitions (and their destinationstates) leaving a state, that this information is actuallycomputed, and optionally cached inside the object forlater reuse. This approach has the advantage that ifonly a part of the result of an operation is needed (forexample in a pruned search), then the unused part isnever computed, saving time and space. We refer theinterested reader to the library documentation and anoverview of the library [Mohri et al., 2000] for fur-ther details on lazy finite-state objects.

We now discuss the key transducer operationsthat are used in our speech applications for modelcombination, redundant path removal, and size re-duction, respectively.

2.3. Composition

Composition is the transducer operation for com-bining different levels of representation. For in-stance, a pronunciation lexicon can be composedwith a word-level grammar to produce a phone-to-


The HMM as a WFST

ax_1 ax_2 ax_3 SE

0

ax_1:<eps>

1ax_1:<eps>

2ax_2:<eps>

ax_2:<eps> ax_3:<eps>

3ax_3:AX


WFST Algorithms

Composition Combine transducers T1 and T2 into a singletransducer acting as if the output of T1 was passedinto T2.

Determinisation Ensure that each state has no more than a singleoutput transition for a given input label

Minimisation transforms a transducer to an equivalent transducerwith the fewest possible states and transitions


Applying WFSTs to speech recognition

Represent the following components as WFSTs

transducer input sequence output sequence

G word-level grammar words wordsL pronunciation lexicon phones wordsC context-dependency CD phones phonesH HMM HMM states CD phones

Composing L and G results in a transducer L ◦ G that maps aphone sequence to a word sequence

H ◦ C ◦ L ◦ G results in a transducer that maps from HMMstates to a word sequence


Reading

Ortmanns and Ney (2000). “The time-conditioned approach indynamic programming search for LVCSR”. In IEEE Transactions onSpeech and Audio Processing, Vol. 8, No. 6.

Mohri et al (2008). “Speech recognition with weighted finite-statetransducers.” In Springer Handbook of Speech Processing, pp.559-584. Springer.http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~mohri/pub/hbka.pdf

WFSTs in Kaldi. http://danielpovey.com/files/Lecture4.pdf


http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~mohri/pub/hbka.pdf

http://danielpovey.com/files/Lecture4.pdf

Date post:	24-May-2020
Category:	Documents
Upload:	others
View:	4 times
Download:	0 times

Large vocabulary ASR · 0 E ASR Lecture 9 Large vocabulary ASR10. Viterbi algorithm: connected word...

Documents