# A Multitask Training Approach to Enhance Whisper with Contextual Biasing and Open-Vocabulary Keyword Spotting

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.09552 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.09552/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 19 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 19 of 19)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02414/) (2022)
- [Attention-Based Models for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.07503/) (2015)
- [AISHELL-1: An Open-Source Mandarin Speech Corpus and A Speech Recognition Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05522/) (2017)
- [Deep Shallow Fusion for RNN-T Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.07754/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Improving End-to-End Contextual Speech Recognition with Fine-Grained Contextual Knowledge Selection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12806/) (2022)
- [Personalization Strategies for End-to-End Speech Recognition Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.07739/) (2021)
- [Fast Contextual Adaptation with Neural Associative Memory for On-Device Personalized Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.02220/) (2021)
- [Seeing wake words: Audio-visual Keyword Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.01225/) (2020)
- [Learning Audio-Text Agreement for Open-vocabulary Keyword Spotting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.15400/) (2022)
- [SeACo-Paraformer: A Non-Autoregressive ASR System with Flexible and Effective Hotword Customization Ability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03266/) (2023)
- [TALCS: An Open-Source Mandarin-English Code-Switching Corpus and a Speech Recognition Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13135/) (2022)
- [Minimising Biasing Word Errors for Contextual ASR with the Tree-Constrained Pointer Generator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09058/) (2022)
- [CB-Conformer: Contextual biasing Conformer for biased word recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09607/) (2023)
- [Open-vocabulary Keyword-spotting with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08561/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Keyword-Guided Adaptation of Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02649/) (2024)
- [Contextual Biasing to Improve Domain-specific Custom Vocabulary Audio Transcription without Explicit Fine-Tuning of Whisper Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18363/) (2024)
- [OWSM-Biasing: Contextualizing Open Whisper-Style Speech Models for Automatic Speech Recognition with Dynamic Vocabulary](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09448/) (2025)
- [WhisperNER: Unified Open Named Entity and Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08107/) (2024)
- [H-PRM: A Pluggable Hotword Pre-Retrieval Module for Various Speech Recognition Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18295/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The recognition of rare named entities, such as personal names and terminologies, is challenging for automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, especially when they are not frequently observed in the training data. In this paper, we introduce keyword spotting enhanced Whisper (KWS-Whisper), a novel ASR system that leverages the Whisper model and performs open-vocabulary keyword spotting (OV-KWS) on the hidden states of the Whisper encoder to recognize user-defined named entities. These entities serve as prompts for the Whisper decoder. To optimize the model, we propose a multitask training approach that learns OV-KWS and contextual-ASR tasks. We evaluate our approach on Chinese Aishell hot word subsets and two internal code-switching test sets and show that it significantly improves the entity recall compared to the original Whisper model. Moreover, we demonstrate that the OV-KWS can be a plug-and-play module to enhance the ASR error correction methods and frozen Whisper models.