Smart Speech Segmentation using Acousto-Linguistic Features with look-ahead

Segmentation for continuous Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has traditionally used silence timeouts or voice activity detectors (VADs), which are both limited to acoustic features. This segmentation is often overly aggressive, given that people naturally pause to think as they speak. Consequently, segmentation happens mid-sentence, hindering both punctuation and downstream tasks like machine translation for which high-quality segmentation is critical. Model-based segmentation methods that leverage acoustic features are powerful, but without an understanding of the language itself, these approaches are limited. We present a hybrid approach that leverages both acoustic and language information to improve segmentation. Furthermore, we show that including one word as a look-ahead boosts segmentation quality. On average, our models improve segmentation-F0.5 score by 9.8% over baseline. We show that this approach works for multiple languages. For the downstream task of machine translation, it improves the translation BLEU score by an average of 1.05 points.

TRScore: A Novel GPT-based Readability Scorer for ASR Segmentation and Punctuation model evaluation and selection

Punctuation and Segmentation are key to readability in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), often evaluated using F1 scores that require high-quality human transcripts and do not reflect readability well. Human evaluation is expensive, time-consuming, and suffers from large inter-observer variability, especially in conversational speech devoid of strict grammatical structures. Large pre-trained models capture a notion of grammatical structure. We present TRScore, a novel readability measure using the GPT model to evaluate different segmentation and punctuation systems. We validate our approach with human experts. Additionally, our approach enables quantitative assessment of text post-processing techniques such as capitalization, inverse text normalization (ITN), and disfluency on overall readability, which traditional word error rate (WER) and slot error rate (SER) metrics fail to capture. TRScore is strongly correlated to traditional F1 and human readability scores, with Pearson's correlation coefficients of 0.67 and 0.98, respectively. It also eliminates the need for human transcriptions for model selection.