Credit: Microsoft
(Tech Xplore)—The languages that we speak: how pervasive will they be
in the computing of tomorrow? We are often being told that we are
getting closer and closer to computers understanding our words as easily
as a human beside us.
Now
Microsoft researchers have every reason to feel especially proud.
According to reports, Microsoft has stepped in front in the race for
supremacy in speech recognition.
The company has claimed a significant test result in their quest for
machines to understand speech. The study describing their work has been
posted arXiv server. The title is "The Microsoft 2016 Conversational
Speech Recognition System." Authors are eight: W. Xiong, J. Droppo, X.
Huang, F. Seide, M. Seltzer, A. Stolcke, D. Yu, G. Zweig.
Wall Street Pit had a report about their work, one of a number
of sites paying attention to what Microsoft researchers achieved. The
Microsoft team turned to "a conversational telephone speech recognition
test used as an industry standard," said Wall Street Pit. That test is the "US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) 2000 Switchboard speech recognition task."
Chief speech scientist for Microsoft, Xuedong Huang, said their researchers achieved a word error rate (WER) of 6.3%, considered the lowest in the industry.
Richard Eckel posted a piece about it, too, on the Microsoft site.
The posting noted some features of their efforts. Earlier this year,
Microsoft researchers won a computer vision challenge by using "a deep
residual neural net system that utilized a new kind of cross-layer
network connection."
It also said that "Another critical component to Microsoft
researchers' recent success is the Computational Network Toolkit. CNTK
implements sophisticated optimizations that enable deep learning
algorithms to run an order of magnitude faster than before. A key step
forward was a breakthrough for parallel training on graphics processing
units, or GPUs."
(GPUs are known for computer graphics, but researchers find they are
also very good for processing complex algorithms such as the ones used
to understand speech, the posting said.)
As for the significance of the error rate, "Last weekend, the international conference speech communication and technology called 'Interspeech' was held in San Francisco," said Wall Street Pit.
"During the event, IBM proudly announced that it was able to reach a
WER of only 6.6%. Over two decades ago, the top error rate of the best
published research system for computer speech recognition was at 43%."
The authors stated, "Our best single system achieves an error rate of
6.9% on the NIST 2000 Switchboard set. We believe this is the best
performance reported to date for a recognition system not based on
system combination. "
Liam Tung in ZDNet noted progress in this field. Tung wrote
that "20 years ago the lowest error rate in speech recognition was 43
percent and that was achieved by IBM in 1995. By 2004, IBM had cut its
error rate to 15.2 percent."
Tung noted that "However, these days with more research funds being
funnelled into deep neural networks, tech giants are boasting error
rates of well below 10 percent, but not quite at a level that exceeds
human-level accuracy, which IBM estimates to be at about four percent."
In describing the system, the authors said, "Inspired by machine
learning ensemble techniques, the system uses a range of convolutional
and recurrent neural networks."
What distinguishes their work from previous work was explained in the paper. "Compared to earlier applications of CNNs to speech recognition, our networks are much deeper, and use linear bypass connections across convolutional layers."
Tung remarked that "Like its rivals, Microsoft has made artificial
intelligence a key plank in its strategy for human-computer interaction
with voice-based platforms such as Cortana set to play a key role in
enabling computing in wearables, mobile, the home, vehicles, and the
enterprise."
https://techxplore.com/news/2016-09-microsoft-error-conversational-speech-recognition.html
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