Jasper: An End-to-End Convolutional Neural Acoustic Model

04/05/2019

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by   Jason Li, et al.

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In this paper, we report state-of-the-art results on LibriSpeech among end-to-end speech recognition models without any external training data. Our model, Jasper, uses only 1D convolutions, batch normalization, ReLU, dropout, and residual connections. To improve training, we further introduce a new layer-wise optimizer called NovoGrad. Through experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed deep architecture performs as well or better than more complex choices. Our deepest Jasper variant uses 54 convolutional layers. With this architecture, we achieve 2.95 neural language model and 3.86 test-clean. We also report competitive results on the Wall Street Journal and the Hub5'00 conversational evaluation datasets.