# Byte Pair Encoding Is All You Need For Automatic Bengali Speech Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.15532 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15532/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 28 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [Neural Machine Translation of Rare Words with Subword Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.07909/) (2015)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [SentencePiece: A simple and language independent subword tokenizer and detokenizer for Neural Text Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.06226/) (2018)
- [Subword Regularization: Improving Neural Network Translation Models with Multiple Subword Candidates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.10959/) (2018)
- [Listen, Attend and Spell](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.01211/) (2015)
- [Byte Pair Encoding is Suboptimal for Language Model Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03720/) (2020)
- [End-to-end ASR: from Supervised to Semi-Supervised Learning with Modern Architectures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.08460/) (2019)
- [Flashlight: Enabling Innovation in Tools for Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12465/) (2022)
- [Acoustic Data-Driven Subword Modeling for End-to-End Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09106/) (2021)
- [Improving End-to-end Speech Recognition with Pronunciation-assisted Sub-word Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04284/) (2018)
- [OOD-Speech: A Large Bengali Speech Recognition Dataset for Out-of-Distribution Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09688/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Byte pair encoding (BPE) emerges as an effective tokenization method for tackling the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) challenge in various natural language and speech processing tasks. Recent research highlights the dependency of BPE subword tokenization's efficacy on the morphological nature of the language, particularly in languages rich in inflectional morphology, where fewer BPE merges suffice for generating highly productive tokens. Motivated by this, our study empirically identifies the optimal number of BPE tokens for Bengali, a language known for its morphological complexity, thus enhancing out-of-distribution automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance. Experimental evaluation reveals that an excessively high number of BPE tokens can lead to overfitting, while approximately 500-1000 tokens result in superior OOV performance. Furthermore, we conduct a comparative analysis of BPE with character-based and unigram-based tokenization methods. By introducing BPE tokenization to Bengali ASR, we achieve a substantial reduction in the word error rate (WER) from 66.44% in our character-based baseline system to 63.80% on the LB-ASRTD eval set and from 46.34% to 42.80% on the SHRUTI eval set, both of which include out-of-distribution data.