Many of the current state-of-the-art Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech
Recognition Systems (LVCSR) are hybrids of neural networks and Hidden Markov
Models (HMMs). Most of these systems contain separate components that deal with
the acoustic modelling, language modelling and sequence decoding. We
investigate a more direct approach in which the HMM is replaced with a
Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that performs sequence prediction directly at
the character level. Alignment between the input features and the desired
character sequence is learned automatically by an attention mechanism built
into the RNN. For each predicted character, the attention mechanism scans the
input sequence and chooses relevant frames. We propose two methods to speed up
this operation: limiting the scan to a subset of most promising frames and
pooling over time the information contained in neighboring frames, thereby
reducing source sequence length. Integrating an n-gram language model into the
decoding process yields recognition accuracies similar to other HMM-free
RNN-based approaches.

该研究研究了一种更直接的方法，即使用循环神经网络来替换隐马尔可夫模型，从而在字符级别直接执行序列预测，通过内置的注意力机制自动学习输入特征与期望字符序列之间的对齐。