Improving Speech Recognition for Indic Languages using Language Model
We study the effect of applying a language model (LM) on the output of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems for Indic languages. We fine-tune wav2vec 2.0 models for 18 Indic languages and adjust the results with language models trained on text derived from a variety of sources. Our findings demonstrate that the average Character Error Rate (CER) decreases by over 28 % and the average Word Error Rate (WER) decreases by about 36 % after decoding with LM. We show that a large LM may not provide a substantial improvement as compared to a diverse one. We also demonstrate that high quality transcriptions can be obtained on domain-specific data without retraining the ASR model and show results on biomedical domain.
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