Paper ID: 2203.16595

Improving Speech Recognition for Indic Languages using Language Model

Ankur Dhuriya, Harveen Singh Chadha, Anirudh Gupta, Priyanshi Shah, Neeraj Chhimwal, Rishabh Gaur, Vivek Raghavan

We study the effect of applying a language model (LM) on the output of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems for Indic languages. We fine-tune wav2vec $2.0$ models for $18$ Indic languages and adjust the results with language models trained on text derived from a variety of sources. Our findings demonstrate that the average Character Error Rate (CER) decreases by over $28$ \% and the average Word Error Rate (WER) decreases by about $36$ \% after decoding with LM. We show that a large LM may not provide a substantial improvement as compared to a diverse one. We also demonstrate that high quality transcriptions can be obtained on domain-specific data without retraining the ASR model and show results on biomedical domain.

Submitted: Mar 30, 2022