John R. Hershey

Also published as: John Hershey


2018

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A Purely End-to-End System for Multi-speaker Speech Recognition
Hiroshi Seki | Takaaki Hori | Shinji Watanabe | Jonathan Le Roux | John R. Hershey
Proceedings of the 56th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recently, there has been growing interest in multi-speaker speech recognition, where the utterances of multiple speakers are recognized from their mixture. Promising techniques have been proposed for this task, but earlier works have required additional training data such as isolated source signals or senone alignments for effective learning. In this paper, we propose a new sequence-to-sequence framework to directly decode multiple label sequences from a single speech sequence by unifying source separation and speech recognition functions in an end-to-end manner. We further propose a new objective function to improve the contrast between the hidden vectors to avoid generating similar hypotheses. Experimental results show that the model is directly able to learn a mapping from a speech mixture to multiple label sequences, achieving 83.1% relative improvement compared to a model trained without the proposed objective. Interestingly, the results are comparable to those produced by previous end-to-end works featuring explicit separation and recognition modules.

2017

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Joint CTC/attention decoding for end-to-end speech recognition
Takaaki Hori | Shinji Watanabe | John Hershey
Proceedings of the 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

End-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) has become a popular alternative to conventional DNN/HMM systems because it avoids the need for linguistic resources such as pronunciation dictionary, tokenization, and context-dependency trees, leading to a greatly simplified model-building process. There are two major types of end-to-end architectures for ASR: attention-based methods use an attention mechanism to perform alignment between acoustic frames and recognized symbols, and connectionist temporal classification (CTC), uses Markov assumptions to efficiently solve sequential problems by dynamic programming. This paper proposes joint decoding algorithm for end-to-end ASR with a hybrid CTC/attention architecture, which effectively utilizes both advantages in decoding. We have applied the proposed method to two ASR benchmarks (spontaneous Japanese and Mandarin Chinese), and showing the comparable performance to conventional state-of-the-art DNN/HMM ASR systems without linguistic resources.

2013

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Statistical Dialogue Management using Intention Dependency Graph
Koichiro Yoshino | Shinji Watanabe | Jonathan Le Roux | John R. Hershey
Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing