Adapting GPT, GPT-2 and BERT Language Models for Speech Recognition
Language models (LMs) pre-trained on massive amounts of text, in particular bidirectional encoder representations from Transformers (BERT), generative pre-training (GPT), and GPT-2, have become a key technology for many natural language processing tasks. In this paper, we present results using fine-tuned GPT, GPT-2, and their combination for automatic speech recognition (ASR). Unlike unidirectional LM GPT and GPT-2, BERT is bidirectional whose direct product of the output probabilities is no longer a valid language prior probability. A conversion method is proposed to compute the correct language prior probability based on bidirectional LM outputs in a mathematically exact way. Experimental results on the widely used AMI and Switchboard ASR tasks showed that the combination of the fine-tuned GPT and GPT-2 outperformed the combination of three neural LMs with different architectures trained from scratch on the in-domain text by up to a 12 (WERR). Furthermore, the proposed conversion for language prior probabilities enables BERT to receive an extra 3 GPT and GPT-2 results in further improvements.
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