Enhancing CTC-based speech recognition with diverse modeling units

In recent years, the evolution of end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) models has been remarkable, largely due to advances in deep learning architectures like transformer. On top of E2E systems, researchers have achieved substantial accuracy improvement by rescoring E2E model's N-best hypotheses with a phoneme-based model. This raises an interesting question about where the improvements come from other than the system combination effect. We examine the underlying mechanisms driving these gains and propose an efficient joint training approach, where E2E models are trained jointly with diverse modeling units. This methodology does not only align the strengths of both phoneme and grapheme-based models but also reveals that using these diverse modeling units in a synergistic way can significantly enhance model accuracy. Our findings offer new insights into the optimal integration of heterogeneous modeling units in the development of more robust and accurate ASR systems.