This paper presents a novel streaming automatic speech recognition (ASR)
framework for multi-talker overlapping speech captured by a distant microphone
array with an arbitrary geometry. Our framework, named t-SOT-VA, capitalizes on
independently developed two recent technologies; array-geometry-agnostic
continuous speech separation, or VarArray, and streaming multi-talker ASR based
on token-level serialized output training (t-SOT). To combine the best of both
technologies, we newly design a t-SOT-based ASR model that generates a
serialized multi-talker transcription based on two separated speech signals
from VarArray. We also propose a pre-training scheme for such an ASR model
where we simulate VarArray's output signals based on monaural single-talker ASR
training data. Conversation transcription experiments using the AMI meeting
corpus show that the system based on the proposed framework significantly
outperforms conventional ones. Our system achieves the state-of-the-art word
error rates of 13.7% and 15.5% for the AMI development and evaluation sets,
respectively, in the multiple-distant-microphone setting while retaining the
streaming inference capability.

该论文提出了一种新的流式机器人语音识别框架，用于捕获具有任意几何结构的远程麦克风阵列捕获的多个讲话者的重叠语音，并提出了一种基于 VarArray 和 t-SOT 的新型 t-SOT-VA 框架，其结合了连续语音分离和多讲话者语音识别技术。