Contrastive siamese network for semi-supervised speech recognition

Abstract

A method includes receiving a plurality of unlabeled audio samples corresponding to spoken utterances not paired with corresponding transcriptions. At a target branch of a contrastive Siamese network, the method also includes generating a sequence of encoder outputs for the plurality of unlabeled audio samples and modifying time characteristics of the encoder outputs to generate a sequence of target branch outputs. At an augmentation branch of a contrastive Siamese network, the method also includes performing augmentation on the unlabeled audio samples, generating a sequence of augmented encoder outputs for the augmented unlabeled audio samples, and generating predictions of the sequence of target branch outputs generated at the target branch. The method also includes determining an unsupervised loss term based on target branch outputs and predictions of the sequence of target branch outputs. The method also includes updating parameters of the audio encoder based on the unsupervised loss term.