# Exploring End-to-End Multi-channel ASR with Bias Information for Meeting Transcription

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.03110 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.03110/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Nov 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Recent Advances in End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.01690/) (2021)
- [A Review of Speaker Diarization: Recent Advances with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09624/) (2021)
- [Improving Noise Robustness of Contrastive Speech Representation Learning with Speech Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15430/) (2021)
- [VarArray: Array-Geometry-Agnostic Continuous Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05745/) (2021)
- [Dual-Encoder Architecture with Encoder Selection for Joint Close-Talk and Far-Talk Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08744/) (2021)
- [Leveraging Real Conversational Data for Multi-Channel Continuous Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03232/) (2022)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Joint optimization of multi-channel front-end and automatic speech recognition (ASR) has attracted much interest. While promising results have been reported for various tasks, past studies on its meeting transcription application were limited to small scale experiments. It is still unclear whether such a joint framework can be beneficial for a more practical setup where a massive amount of single channel training data can be leveraged for building a strong ASR back-end. In this work, we present our investigation on the joint modeling of a mask-based beamformer and Attention-Encoder-Decoder-based ASR in the setting where we have 75k hours of single-channel data and a relatively small amount of real multi-channel data for model training. We explore effective training procedures, including a comparison of simulated and real multi-channel training data. To guide the recognition towards a target speaker and deal with overlapped speech, we also explore various combinations of bias information, such as direction of arrivals and speaker profiles. We propose an effective location bias integration method called deep concatenation for the beamformer network. In our evaluation on various meeting recordings, we show that the proposed framework achieves a substantial word error rate reduction.