Streaming Punctuation for Long-form Dictation with Transformers

Understand

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.