Andreas Krug


2018

pdf bib
Introspection for convolutional automatic speech recognition
Andreas Krug | Sebastian Stober
Proceedings of the 2018 EMNLP Workshop BlackboxNLP: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) have experienced great success in the past few years. The increasing complexity of these models leads to less understanding about their decision processes. Therefore, introspection techniques have been proposed, mostly for images as input data. Patterns or relevant regions in images can be intuitively interpreted by a human observer. This is not the case for more complex data like speech recordings. In this work, we investigate the application of common introspection techniques from computer vision to an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) task. To this end, we use a model similar to image classification, which predicts letters from spectrograms. We show difficulties in applying image introspection to ASR. To tackle these problems, we propose normalized averaging of aligned inputs (NAvAI): a data-driven method to reveal learned patterns for prediction of specific classes. Our method integrates information from many data examples through local introspection techniques for Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We demonstrate that our method provides better interpretability of letter-specific patterns than existing methods.

2017

pdf bib
Transfer Learning for Speech Recognition on a Budget
Julius Kunze | Louis Kirsch | Ilia Kurenkov | Andreas Krug | Jens Johannsmeier | Sebastian Stober
Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Representation Learning for NLP

End-to-end training of automated speech recognition (ASR) systems requires massive data and compute resources. We explore transfer learning based on model adaptation as an approach for training ASR models under constrained GPU memory, throughput and training data. We conduct several systematic experiments adapting a Wav2Letter convolutional neural network originally trained for English ASR to the German language. We show that this technique allows faster training on consumer-grade resources while requiring less training data in order to achieve the same accuracy, thereby lowering the cost of training ASR models in other languages. Model introspection revealed that small adaptations to the network’s weights were sufficient for good performance, especially for inner layers.