# DANCER: Entity Description Augmented Named Entity Corrector for Automatic Speech Recognition

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.17645 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17645/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Conformer: Convolution-augmented Transformer for Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.08100/) (2020)
- [Generalization through Memorization: Nearest Neighbor Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00172/) (2019)
- [AISHELL-1: An Open-Source Mandarin Speech Corpus and A Speech Recognition Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.05522/) (2017)
- [Deep context: end-to-end contextual speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.02480/) (2018)
- [Contextual RNN-T For Open Domain ASR](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.03411/) (2020)
- [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)
- [ASR Error Correction and Domain Adaptation Using Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07692/) (2020)
- [FastCorrect: Fast Error Correction with Edit Alignment for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03842/) (2021)
- [FastCorrect 2: Fast Error Correction on Multiple Candidates for Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.14420/) (2021)
- [AISHELL-NER: Named Entity Recognition from Chinese Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.08533/) (2022)
- [Attention based on-device streaming speech recognition with large speech corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00577/) (2020)
- [No Need for a Lexicon? Evaluating the Value of the Pronunciation Lexica in End-to-End Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.01864/) (2017)
- [uChecker: Masked Pretrained Language Models as Unsupervised Chinese Spelling Checkers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07068/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [An Effective Context-Balanced Adaptation Approach for Long-Tailed Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06468/) (2024)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Self-Taught Reasoning Model with Adaptive Chain-of-Thought for ASR Named Entity Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12287/) (2026)
- [Error-Aware TF-IDF Retrieval-Augmented Generation for ASR Error Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.24915/) (2026)
- [HearInContext: A Benchmark for Implicit Context in Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.18680/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

End-to-end automatic speech recognition (E2E ASR) systems often suffer from mistranscription of domain-specific phrases, such as named entities, sometimes leading to catastrophic failures in downstream tasks. A family of fast and lightweight named entity correction (NEC) models for ASR have recently been proposed, which normally build on phonetic-level edit distance algorithms and have shown impressive NEC performance. However, as the named entity (NE) list grows, the problems of phonetic confusion in the NE list are exacerbated; for example, homophone ambiguities increase substantially. In view of this, we proposed a novel Description Augmented Named entity CorrEctoR (dubbed DANCER), which leverages entity descriptions to provide additional information to facilitate mitigation of phonetic confusion for NEC on ASR transcription. To this end, an efficient entity description augmented masked language model (EDA-MLM) comprised of a dense retrieval model is introduced, enabling MLM to adapt swiftly to domain-specific entities for the NEC task. A series of experiments conducted on the AISHELL-1 and Homophone datasets confirm the effectiveness of our modeling approach. DANCER outperforms a strong baseline, the phonetic edit-distance-based NEC model (PED-NEC), by a character error rate (CER) reduction of about 7% relatively on AISHELL-1 for named entities. More notably, when tested on Homophone that contain named entities of high phonetic confusion, DANCER offers a more pronounced CER reduction of 46% relatively over PED-NEC for named entities.