Evaluating Modeling Units and Sub-word Features in Language Models for Turkish ASR
Chang Liu, Yike Zhang, Pengyuan Zhang, Yaofeng Wang · 2018
Turkish is a morphologically rich language, which leads to serious data sparsity problems in language modeling for automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks. Using sub-words as language modeling units and incorporating sub-word features into word-level models are two strategies to alleviate the problem. In this paper, we propose a novel model architecture which can incorporate sub-word features directly. And we use a CNN to learn (sub)word embeddings as sub-word features from character or sub-word level input. We evaluate the proposed model on Turkish ASR task. We choose word and morph (sub-word) as language modeling unit respectively. Results show that the consistency between language modeling units and ASR system units is important for the effectiveness of rescoring. And the proposed method reduces the word error rate (WER) of word and statistical sub-word level system by absolute 1.56% and 1.87%.