Masked Pre-trained Encoder base on Joint CTC-Transformer

This study (The work was accomplished during the internship in Tencent AI lab) addresses semi-supervised acoustic modeling, i.e. attaining high-level representations from unsupervised audio data and fine-tuning the parameters of pre-trained model with supervised data. The proposed approach adopts a two-stage training framework, consisting of masked pre-trained encoder (MPE) and Joint CTC-Transformer (JCT). In the MPE framework, part of input frames are masked and reconstructed after the encoder with massive unsupervised data. In JCT framework, compared with original Transformer, acoustic features are applied as input instead of plain text. CTC loss performs as the prediction target on top of the encoder, and decoder blocks remain unchanged. This paper presents a comparison between two-stage training method and the fully supervised JCT. In addition, this paper investigates the our approach's robustness against different volumns of training data. Experiments on the two-stage training method deliver much better performance than fully supervised model. The word error rate (WER) with two-stage training which only exploits 30\% of WSJ labeled data achieves 17\% reduction than which trained by 50\% of WSJ in a fully supervised way. Moreover, increasing unlabeled data for MPE from WSJ (81h) to Librispeech (960h) attains about 22\% WER reduction.