While speech recognition Word Error Rate (WER) has reached human parity for English, long-form dictation scenarios still suffer from segmentation and punctuation problems resulting from irregular pausing patterns or slow speakers. Transformer sequence tagging models are effective at capturing long bi-directional context, which is crucial for automatic punctuation. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) production systems, however, are constrained by real-time requirements, making it hard to incorporate the right context when making punctuation decisions. In this paper, we propose a streaming approach for punctuation or re-punctuation of ASR output using dynamic decoding windows and measure its impact on punctuation and segmentation accuracy across scenarios. The new system tackles over-segmentation issues, improving segmentation F0.5-score by 13.9%. Streaming punctuation achieves an average BLEU-score improvement of 0.66 for the downstream task of Machine Translation (MT).
@article{arxiv.2210.05756,
title = {Streaming Punctuation for Long-form Dictation with Transformers},
author = {Piyush Behre and Sharman Tan and Padma Varadharajan and Shuangyu Chang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.05756},
year = {2022}
}