Improving Contextual Spelling Correction by External Acoustics Attention and Semantic Aware Data Augmentation

We previously proposed contextual spelling correction (CSC) to correct the output of end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) models with contextual information such as name, place, etc. Although CSC has achieved reasonable improvement in the biasing problem, there are still two drawbacks for further accuracy improvement. First, due to information limitation in text only hypothesis or weak performance of ASR model on rare domains, the CSC model may fail to correct phrases with similar pronunciation or anti-context cases where all biasing phrases are not present in the utterance. Second, there is a discrepancy between the training and inference of CSC. The bias list in training is randomly selected but in inference there may be more similarity between ground truth phrase and other phrases. To solve above limitations, in this paper we propose an improved non-autoregressive (NAR) spelling correction model for contextual biasing in E2E neural transducer-based ASR systems to improve the previous CSC model from two perspectives: Firstly, we incorporate acoustics information with an external attention as well as text hypotheses into CSC to better distinguish target phrase from dissimilar or irrelevant phrases. Secondly, we design a semantic aware data augmentation schema in training phrase to reduce the mismatch between training and inference to further boost the biasing accuracy. Experiments show that the improved method outperforms the baseline ASR+Biasing system by as much as 20.3% relative name recall gain and achieves stable improvement compared to the previous CSC method over different bias list name coverage ratio.