Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hi! I'm from the RWTH team ( https://paperswithcode.com/sota/speech-recognition-on-libris... ). Our best system (2.3% WER) (trained only on the Librispeech data, i.e. much less data than your model) currently is a hybrid HMM/NN model, and you are right, the acoustic model uses a BLSTM. However, we have shown in other work ( https://www-i6.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/publications/downlo... ) that you can expect similar…
Hi! > I guess you prefer an "end-to-end" model over a hybrid HMM/NN model, for simplicity, right? Simplicity and ease of targeting other languages, yes. We're a small team. > As far as I remember, you use CTC, right? I always wondered why you have chosen CTC, and not some better model, like RNN-T, RNA, or some of the streaming attention variants. We started DeepSpeech in 2016, before these recent developments for end…
It uses our TensorFlow framework Returnn (https://github.com/rwth-i6/returnn). We currently only have some configs/code online for hard attention variants, or segmental models. They can be found here: https://github.com/rwth-i6/returnn-experiments/tree/master/2...
Note that the configs are maybe not so cleaned up, as this is very much research. This is for a paper we submitted to ICASSP. We did not publish the paper yet elsewhere, but I can send you a copy by mail (just contact me: albzey@gmail.com).
Also, as this is research focused, the encoder here is also a BLSTM, because we wanted to compare this work to other global soft attention models, and have the comparison mostly focused on the streaming attention modeling aspect. And also there is some lookahead, which is currently unlimited. So it would need a few modifications to really be used for online streaming. I'm also not sure whether this is the best model, or whether some of the many other variants (MoChA, RNN-T, etc) are maybe better.
Edit: I forgot, we also have some local windowed attention variants, which can also be applied for streaming: https://github.com/rwth-i6/returnn-experiments/tree/master/2...