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Leveraging Text Data Using Hybrid Transformer-LSTM Based End-to-End ASR in Transfer Learning

In this work, we study leveraging extra text data to improve low-resource end-to-end ASR under cross-lingual transfer learning setting. To this end, we extend our prior work [1], and propose a hybrid Transformer-LSTM based architecture. This architecture not only takes advantage of the highly effective encoding capacity of the Transformer network but also benefits from extra text data due to the LSTM-based independent language model network. We conduct experiments on our in-house Malay corpus which contains limited labeled data and a large amount of extra text. Results show that the proposed architecture outperforms the previous LSTM-based architecture [1] by 24.2% relative word error rate (WER) when both are trained using limited labeled data. Starting from this, we obtain further 25.4% relative WER reduction by transfer learning from another resource-rich language. Moreover, we obtain additional 13.6% relative WER reduction by boosting the LSTM decoder of the transferred model with the extra text data. Overall, our best model outperforms the vanilla Transformer ASR by 11.9% relative WER. Last but not least, the proposed hybrid architecture offers much faster inference compared to both LSTM and Transformer architectures.