Knowing the particular context associated with a conversation can help improving the performance of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system. For example, if we are provided with a list of in-context words or phrases — such as the speaker’s contacts or recent song playlists — during inference, we can bias the recognition process towards this list. There are many works addressing contextual ASR; however, there is few publicly available real benchmark for evaluation, making it difficult to compare different solutions. To this end, we provide a corpus (“ConEC”) and baselines to evaluate contextual ASR approaches, grounded on real-world applications. The ConEC corpus is based on public-domain earnings calls (ECs) and associated supplementary materials, such as presentation slides, earnings news release as well as a list of meeting participants’ names and affiliations. We demonstrate that such real contexts are noisier than artificially synthesized contexts that contain the ground truth, yet they still make great room for future improvement of contextual ASR technology

The task of relation classification in the biomedical domain is complex due to the presence of samples obtained from heterogeneous sources such as research articles, discharge summaries, or electronic health records. It is also a constraint for classifiers which employ manual feature engineering. In this paper, we propose a convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) architecture that combines RNNs and CNNs in sequence to solve this problem. The rationale behind our approach is that CNNs can effectively identify coarse-grained local features in a sentence, while RNNs are more suited for long-term dependencies. We compare our CRNN model with several baselines on two biomedical datasets, namely the i2b2-2010 clinical relation extraction challenge dataset, and the SemEval-2013 DDI extraction dataset. We also evaluate an attentive pooling technique and report its performance in comparison with the conventional max pooling method. Our results indicate that the proposed model achieves state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.