Improving Distinction between ASR Errors and Speech Disfluencies with Feature Space Interpolation

Fine-tuning pretrained language models (LMs) is a popular approach to automatic speech recognition (ASR) error detection during post-processing. While error detection systems often take advantage of statistical language archetypes captured by LMs, at times the pretrained knowledge can hinder error detection performance. For instance, presence of speech disfluencies might confuse the post-processing system into tagging disfluent but accurate transcriptions as ASR errors. Such confusion occurs because both error detection and disfluency detection tasks attempt to identify tokens at statistically unlikely positions. This paper proposes a scheme to improve existing LM-based ASR error detection systems, both in terms of detection scores and resilience to such distracting auxiliary tasks. Our approach adopts the popular mixup method in text feature space and can be utilized with any black-box ASR output. To demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, we conduct post-processing experiments with both traditional and end-to-end ASR systems (both for English and Korean languages) with 5 different speech corpora. We find that our method improves both ASR error detection F 1 scores and reduces the number of correctly transcribed disfluencies wrongly detected as ASR errors. Finally, we suggest methods to utilize resulting LMs directly in semi-supervised ASR training.