Improving End-to-end Speech Recognition with Pronunciation-assisted Sub-word Modeling

In recent years, end-to-end models have become popular for application in automatic speech recognition. Compared to hybrid approaches, which perform the phone-sequence to word conversion based on a lexicon, an end-to-end system models text directly, usually as a sequence of characters or sub-word features. We propose a sub-word modeling method that leverages the pronunciation information of a word. Experiments show that the proposed method can greatly improve upon the character-based baseline, and also outperform commonly used byte-pair encoding methods.