Semi-supervised learning of speech recognizers based on variational autoencoder and unsupervised data augmentation

We propose a semi-supervised learning method based on Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) and Unsupervised Data Augmentation (UDA) to improve the performance of an end-to-end speech recognizer. In the proposed method, first, the VAE-based augmentation model and the baseline end-to-end speech recognizer are trained using the original speech data. Then, the baseline end-to-end speech recognizer is trained again using data augmented from the learned augmentation model. Finally, the learned augmentation model and end-to-end speech recognizer are re-learned using the UDA-based semi-supervised learning method. As a result of the computer simulation, the augmentation model is shown to improve the Word Error Rate (WER) of the baseline end-to-end speech recognizer, and further improve its performance by combining it with the UDA-based learning method.