# Contextual RNN-T For Open Domain ASR

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.03411 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03411/

## Key facts

- Cited by 85 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 85)

- [Recent Advances in End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01690/) (2021)
- [Contextualized Streaming End-to-End Speech Recognition with Trie-Based Deep Biasing and Shallow Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02194/) (2021)
- [Contextual Adapters for Personalized Speech Recognition in Neural Transducers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.13660/) (2022)
- [Context-Aware Transformer Transducer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.03250/) (2021)
- [WeNet 2.0: More Productive End-to-End Speech Recognition Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.15455/) (2022)
- [Improving End-to-End Contextual Speech Recognition with Fine-Grained Contextual Knowledge Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12806/) (2022)
- [Tree-constrained Pointer Generator for End-to-end Contextual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00627/) (2021)
- [Fast Contextual Adaptation with Neural Associative Memory for On-Device Personalized Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02220/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Speech Recognition Contextualization with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10917/) (2023)
- [Can Contextual Biasing Remain Effective with Whisper and GPT-2?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.01942/) (2023)
- [Contextualized Automatic Speech Recognition with Attention-Based Bias Phrase Boosted Beam Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10449/) (2024)
- [CTC-Assisted LLM-Based Contextual ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.06437/) (2024)
- [Robust Acoustic and Semantic Contextual Biasing in Neural Transducers for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05271/) (2023)
- [SeACo-Paraformer: A Non-Autoregressive ASR System with Flexible and Effective Hotword Customization Ability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03266/) (2023)
- [Towards Contextual Spelling Correction for Customization of End-to-end Speech Recognition Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.00888/) (2022)
- [Tree-constrained Pointer Generator with Graph Neural Network Encodings for Contextual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00857/) (2022)
- [Improving Contextual Recognition of Rare Words with an Alternate Spelling Prediction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01250/) (2022)
- [Improving ASR Contextual Biasing with Guided Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08835/) (2024)
- [CopyNE: Better Contextual ASR by Copying Named Entities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12839/) (2023)
- [Phoneme-aware Encoding for Prefix-tree-based Contextual ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09582/) (2023)
- [Two Stage Contextual Word Filtering for Context bias in Unified Streaming and Non-streaming Transducer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06735/) (2023)
- [A Light-weight contextual spelling correction model for customizing transducer-based speech recognition systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07493/) (2021)
- [Minimising Biasing Word Errors for Contextual ASR with the Tree-Constrained Pointer Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09058/) (2022)
- [Improving Neural Biasing for Contextual Speech Recognition by Early Context Injection and Text Perturbation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.10303/) (2024)
- [Spell my name: keyword boosted speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02791/) (2021)
- [Contextualized End-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition with Intermediate Biasing Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16120/) (2024)
- [Improving Contextual Spelling Correction by External Acoustics Attention and Semantic Aware Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11192/) (2023)
- [Approximate Nearest Neighbour Phrase Mining for Contextual Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08862/) (2023)
- [Importance of Smoothness Induced by Optimizers in FL4ASR: Towards Understanding Federated Learning for End-to-End ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.13102/) (2023)
- [Contextualized Automatic Speech Recognition with Dynamic Vocabulary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.13344/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-end (E2E) systems for automatic speech recognition (ASR), such as RNN Transducer (RNN-T) and Listen-Attend-Spell (LAS) blend the individual components of a traditional hybrid ASR system - acoustic model, language model, pronunciation model - into a single neural network. While this has some nice advantages, it limits the system to be trained using only paired audio and text. Because of this, E2E models tend to have difficulties with correctly recognizing rare words that are not frequently seen during training, such as entity names. In this paper, we propose modifications to the RNN-T model that allow the model to utilize additional metadata text with the objective of improving performance on these named entity words. We evaluate our approach on an in-house dataset sampled from de-identified public social media videos, which represent an open domain ASR task. By using an attention model and a biasing model to leverage the contextual metadata that accompanies a video, we observe a relative improvement of about 16% in Word Error Rate on Named Entities (WER-NE) for videos with related metadata.