Error Correction in ASR using Sequence-to-Sequence Models

Post-editing in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) entails automatically correcting common and systematic errors produced by the ASR system. The outputs of an ASR system are largely prone to phonetic and spelling errors. In this paper, we propose to use a powerful pre-trained sequence-to-sequence model, BART, further adaptively trained to serve as a denoising model, to correct errors of such types. The adaptive training is performed on an augmented dataset obtained by synthetically inducing errors as well as by incorporating actual errors from an existing ASR system. We also propose a simple approach to rescore the outputs using word level alignments. Experimental results on accented speech data demonstrate that our strategy effectively rectifies a significant number of ASR errors and produces improved WER results when compared against a competitive baseline.