Dual-Path Style Learning for End-to-End Noise-Robust Speech Recognition (2203.14838v3)

Abstract: Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems degrade significantly under noisy conditions. Recently, speech enhancement (SE) is introduced as front-end to reduce noise for ASR, but it also suppresses some important speech information, i.e., over-suppression. To alleviate this, we propose a dual-path style learning approach for end-to-end noise-robust speech recognition (DPSL-ASR). Specifically, we first introduce clean speech feature along with the fused feature from IFF-Net as dual-path inputs to recover the suppressed information. Then, we propose style learning to map the fused feature close to clean feature, in order to learn latent speech information from the latter, i.e., clean "speech style". Furthermore, we also minimize the distance of final ASR outputs in two paths to improve noise-robustness. Experiments show that the proposed approach achieves relative word error rate (WER) reductions of 10.6% and 8.6% over the best IFF-Net baseline, on RATS and CHiME-4 datasets respectively.