DANCER: Entity Description Augmented Named Entity Corrector for Automatic Speech Recognition

Yi-Cheng Wang, Hsin-Wei Wang, Bi-Cheng Yan, Chi-Han Lin, Berlin Chen


Abstract
End-to-end automatic speech recognition (E2E ASR) systems often suffer from mistranscription of domain-specific phrases, such as named entities, sometimes leading to catastrophic failures in downstream tasks. A family of fast and lightweight named entity correction (NEC) models for ASR have recently been proposed, which normally build on pho-netic-level edit distance algorithms and have shown impressive NEC performance. However, as the named entity (NE) list grows, the problems of phonetic confusion in the NE list are exacerbated; for example, homophone ambiguities increase substantially. In view of this, we proposed a novel Description Augmented Named entity CorrEctoR (dubbed DANCER), which leverages entity descriptions to provide additional information to facilitate mitigation of phonetic con-fusion for NEC on ASR transcription. To this end, an efficient entity description augmented masked language model (EDA-MLM) comprised of a dense retrieval model is introduced, enabling MLM to adapt swiftly to domain-specific entities for the NEC task. A series of experiments conducted on the AISHELL-1 and Homophone datasets confirm the effectiveness of our modeling approach. DANCER outperforms a strong baseline, the phonetic edit-distance-based NEC model (PED-NEC), by a character error rate (CER) reduction of about 7% relatively on AISHELL-1 for named entities. More notably, when tested on Homophone that contain named entities of high phonetic confusion, DANCER offers a more pronounced CER reduction of 46% relatively over PED-NEC for named entities. The code is available at https://github.com/Amiannn/Dancer.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.387
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
4333–4342
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.387
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yi-Cheng Wang, Hsin-Wei Wang, Bi-Cheng Yan, Chi-Han Lin, and Berlin Chen. 2024. DANCER: Entity Description Augmented Named Entity Corrector for Automatic Speech Recognition. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 4333–4342, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
DANCER: Entity Description Augmented Named Entity Corrector for Automatic Speech Recognition (Wang et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.387.pdf