SpeechNet: Weakly Supervised, End-to-End Speech Recognition at Industrial Scale

Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, Gefei Yang, Akshat Pandey, Yajie Mao, Vladislav Belyaev, Madhuri Emmadi, Craig Murray, Ferhan Ture, Jimmy Lin


Abstract
End-to-end automatic speech recognition systems represent the state of the art, but they rely on thousands of hours of manually annotated speech for training, as well as heavyweight computation for inference. Of course, this impedes commercialization since most companies lack vast human and computational resources. In this paper, we explore training and deploying an ASR system in the label-scarce, compute-limited setting. To reduce human labor, we use a third-party ASR system as a weak supervision source, supplemented with labeling functions derived from implicit user feedback. To accelerate inference, we propose to route production-time queries across a pool of CUDA graphs of varying input lengths, the distribution of which best matches the traffic’s. Compared to our third-party ASR, we achieve a relative improvement in word-error rate of 8% and a speedup of 600%. Our system, called SpeechNet, currently serves 12 million queries per day on our voice-enabled smart television. To our knowledge, this is the first time a large-scale, Wav2vec-based deployment has been described in the academic literature.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-industry.29
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Yunyao Li, Angeliki Lazaridou
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
285–293
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-industry.29
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-industry.29
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Raphael Tang, Karun Kumar, Gefei Yang, Akshat Pandey, Yajie Mao, Vladislav Belyaev, Madhuri Emmadi, Craig Murray, Ferhan Ture, and Jimmy Lin. 2022. SpeechNet: Weakly Supervised, End-to-End Speech Recognition at Industrial Scale. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: Industry Track, pages 285–293, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SpeechNet: Weakly Supervised, End-to-End Speech Recognition at Industrial Scale (Tang et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_acl24_videos/2022.emnlp-industry.29.pdf