Paper ID: 2305.13408

Modular Domain Adaptation for Conformer-Based Streaming ASR

Qiujia Li, Bo Li, Dongseong Hwang, Tara N. Sainath, Pedro M. Mengibar

Speech data from different domains has distinct acoustic and linguistic characteristics. It is common to train a single multidomain model such as a Conformer transducer for speech recognition on a mixture of data from all domains. However, changing data in one domain or adding a new domain would require the multidomain model to be retrained. To this end, we propose a framework called modular domain adaptation (MDA) that enables a single model to process multidomain data while keeping all parameters domain-specific, i.e., each parameter is only trained by data from one domain. On a streaming Conformer transducer trained only on video caption data, experimental results show that an MDA-based model can reach similar performance as the multidomain model on other domains such as voice search and dictation by adding per-domain adapters and per-domain feed-forward networks in the Conformer encoder.

Submitted: May 22, 2023