With the increase of automatic speech recognition (ASR) applications, spoken-to-written style conversion that transforms spoken-style text into written-style text is becoming an important technology to increase the readability of ASR transcriptions. To establish such conversion technology, a parallel corpus of spoken-style text and written-style text is beneficial because it can be utilized for building end-to-end neural sequence transformation models. Spoken-to-written style conversion involves multiple conversion problems including punctuation restoration, disfluency detection, and simplification. However, most existing corpora tend to be made for just one of these conversion problems. In addition, in Japanese, we have to consider not only general spoken-to-written style conversion problems but also Japanese-specific ones, such as language style unification (e.g., polite, frank, and direct styles) and omitted postpositional particle expressions restoration. Therefore, we created a new Japanese parallel corpus of spoken-style text and written-style text that can simultaneously handle general problems and Japanese-specific ones. To make this corpus, we prepared four types of spoken-style text and utilized a crowdsourcing service for manually converting them into written-style text. This paper describes the building setup of this corpus and reports the baseline results of spoken-to-written style conversion using the latest neural sequence transformation models.

This paper presents a novel fusion method for integrating an external language model (LM) into the Transformer based sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) model. While paired data are basically required to train the seq2seq model, the external LM can be trained with only unpaired data. Thus, it is important to leverage memorized knowledge in the external LM for building the seq2seq model, since it is hard to prepare a large amount of paired data. However, the existing fusion methods assume that the LM is integrated with recurrent neural network-based seq2seq models instead of the Transformer. Therefore, this paper proposes a fusion method that can explicitly utilize network structures in the Transformer. The proposed method, called memory attentive fusion, leverages the Transformer-style attention mechanism that repeats source-target attention in a multi-hop manner for reading the memorized knowledge in the LM. Our experiments on two text-style conversion tasks demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than conventional fusion methods.