The lack of speech data annotated with labels required for spoken language understanding (SLU) is often a major hurdle in building end-to-end (E2E) systems that can directly process speech inputs. In contrast, large amounts of text data with suitable labels are usually available. In this paper, we propose a novel text representation and training methodology that allows E2E SLU systems to be effectively constructed using these text resources. With very limited amounts of additional speech, we show that these models can be further improved to perform at levels close to similar systems built on the full speech datasets. The efficacy of our proposed approach is demonstrated on both intent and entity tasks using three different SLU datasets. With text-only training, the proposed system achieves up to 90% of the performance possible with full speech training. With just an additional 10% of speech data, these models significantly improve further to 97% of full performance.

本文介绍了一种使用少量的语音数据和大量的文本数据结合的方法，可以有效地构建端到端的语音理解系统，并在句意和实体两个任务上得到了验证，最终得出该方法可以在仅使用文本数据进行训练的情况下，达到与使用全部语音数据进行训练的系统性能相近的结果。

减少语音训练数据需求以构建口语理解系统