Kadri Hacioğlu

Iuliia Thorbecke, Esaú Villatoro-Tello, Juan Zuluaga-Gomez et al.

Despite the success of end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, challenges persist in recognizing rare, out-of-vocabulary words - including named entities (NE) - and in adapting to new domains using only text data. This work presents a practical approach to address these challenges through an unexplored combination of an NE bias list and a word-level n-gram language model (LM). This solution balances simplicity and effectiveness, improving entities' recognition while maintaining or even enhancing overall ASR performance. We efficiently integrate this enriched biasing method into a transducer-based ASR system, enabling context adaptation with almost no computational overhead. We present our results on three datasets spanning four languages and compare them to state-of-the-art biasing strategies. We demonstrate that the proposed combination of keyword biasing and n-gram LM improves entity recognition by up to 32% relative and reduces overall WER by up to a 12% relative.

Shashi Kumar, Iuliia Thorbecke, Sergio Burdisso et al.

Recent research has demonstrated that training a linear connector between speech foundation encoders and large language models (LLMs) enables this architecture to achieve strong ASR capabilities. Despite the impressive results, it remains unclear whether these simple approaches are robust enough across different scenarios and speech conditions, such as domain shifts and speech perturbations. In this paper, we address these questions by conducting various ablation experiments using a recent and widely adopted approach called SLAM-ASR. We present novel empirical findings that offer insights on how to effectively utilize the SLAM-ASR architecture across a wide range of settings. Our main findings indicate that SLAM-ASR exhibits poor performance in cross-domain evaluation settings. Additionally, speech perturbations on in-domain data, such as changes in speech rate or additive noise, can significantly degrade performance. Our findings offer critical insights for fine-tuning and configuring robust LLM-based ASR models, tailored to different data characteristics and computational resources.

Shashi Kumar, Srikanth Madikeri, Esaú Villatoro-Tello et al.

Token-based multitasking frameworks like TokenVerse require all training utterances to have labels for all tasks, hindering their ability to leverage partially annotated datasets and scale effectively. We propose TokenVerse++, which introduces learnable vectors in the acoustic embedding space of the XLSR-Transducer ASR model for dynamic task activation. This core mechanism enables training with utterances labeled for only a subset of tasks, a key advantage over TokenVerse. We demonstrate this by successfully integrating a dataset with partial labels, specifically for ASR and an additional task, language identification, improving overall performance. TokenVerse++ achieves results on par with or exceeding TokenVerse across multiple tasks, establishing it as a more practical multitask alternative without sacrificing ASR performance.