# Guided Source Separation Meets a Strong ASR Backend: Hitachi/Paderborn University Joint Investigation for Dinner Party ASR

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.12230 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12230/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 29 May 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [A Review of Speaker Diarization: Recent Advances with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09624/) (2021)
- [Streaming Multi-Talker ASR with Token-Level Serialized Output Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.00842/) (2022)
- [A Comparative Study of Modular and Joint Approaches for Speaker-Attributed ASR on Monaural Long-Form Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.02852/) (2021)
- [Hypothesis Stitcher for End-to-End Speaker-attributed ASR on Long-form Multi-talker Recordings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.01853/) (2021)
- [VarArray Meets t-SOT: Advancing the State of the Art of Streaming Distant Conversational Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04974/) (2022)
- [A Systematic Comparison of Phonetic Aware Techniques for Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11000/) (2022)
- [The USTC-Ximalaya system for the ICASSP 2022 multi-channel multi-party meeting transcription (M2MeT) challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.04855/) (2022)
- [Joint Beamforming and Speaker-Attributed ASR for Real Distant-Microphone Meeting Transcription](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21849/) (2024)
- [Improving Neural Diarization through Speaker Attribute Attractors and Local Dependency Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05593/) (2025)
- [SpatialEmb: Extract and Encode Spatial Information for 1-Stage Multi-channel Multi-speaker ASR on Arbitrary Microphone Arrays](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.18037/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we present Hitachi and Paderborn University's joint effort for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in a dinner party scenario. The main challenges of ASR systems for dinner party recordings obtained by multiple microphone arrays are (1) heavy speech overlaps, (2) severe noise and reverberation, (3) very natural conversational content, and possibly (4) insufficient training data. As an example of a dinner party scenario, we have chosen the data presented during the CHiME-5 speech recognition challenge, where the baseline ASR had a 73.3% word error rate (WER), and even the best performing system at the CHiME-5 challenge had a 46.1% WER. We extensively investigated a combination of the guided source separation-based speech enhancement technique and an already proposed strong ASR backend and found that a tight combination of these techniques provided substantial accuracy improvements. Our final system achieved WERs of 39.94% and 41.64% for the development and evaluation data, respectively, both of which are the best published results for the dataset. We also investigated with additional training data on the official small data in the CHiME-5 corpus to assess the intrinsic difficulty of this ASR task.