English

Attention-based Neural Beamforming Layers for Multi-channel Speech Recognition

Audio and Speech Processing 2021-05-18 v2 Machine Learning Sound

Abstract

Attention-based beamformers have recently been shown to be effective for multi-channel speech recognition. However, they are less capable at capturing local information. In this work, we propose a 2D Conv-Attention module which combines convolution neural networks with attention for beamforming. We apply self- and cross-attention to explicitly model the correlations within and between the input channels. The end-to-end 2D Conv-Attention model is compared with a multi-head self-attention and superdirective-based neural beamformers. We train and evaluate on an in-house multi-channel dataset. The results show a relative improvement of 3.8% in WER by the proposed model over the baseline neural beamformer.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2105.05920,
  title  = {Attention-based Neural Beamforming Layers for Multi-channel Speech Recognition},
  author = {Bhargav Pulugundla and Yang Gao and Brian King and Gokce Keskin and Harish Mallidi and Minhua Wu and Jasha Droppo and Roland Maas},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2105.05920},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T02:03:17.553Z