End-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) models, including both attention-based models and the recurrent neural network transducer (RNN-T), have shown superior performance compared to conventional systems. However, previous studies have focused primarily on short utterances that typically last for just a few seconds or, at most, a few tens of seconds. Whether such architectures are practical on long utterances that last from minutes to hours remains an open question. In this paper, we both investigate and improve the performance of end-to-end models on long-form transcription. We first present an empirical comparison of different end-to-end models on a real world long-form task and demonstrate that the RNN-T model is much more robust than attention-based systems in this regime. We next explore two improvements to attention-based systems that significantly improve its performance: restricting the attention to be monotonic, and applying a novel decoding algorithm that breaks long utterances into shorter overlapping segments. Combining these two improvements, we show that attention-based end-to-end models can be very competitive to RNN-T on long-form speech recognition.

本研究调查和提高端到端模型在长篇转录上的性能。实验比较了不同的端到端模型并证明RNN-T模型在这种场景下比注意力模型更加鲁棒，并且使用限制注意力单调性和分段解码算法等两种改进方法，将注意力模型的性能极大提升，达到了和RNN-T模型相当的水平。

长篇语音识别的端到端模型比较