? Transformers Wav2Vec2 + Parlance’s CTCDecode

Introduction

This repo shows how ? Transformers can be used in combination
with Parlance’s ctcdecode & KenLM ngram
as a simple way to boost word error rate (WER).

Included is a file to create an ngram with KenLM as well as a simple evaluation script to
compare the results of using Wav2Vec2 with ctcdecode + KenLM vs. without using any language model.

Note: The scripts are written to be used on GPU. If you want to use a CPU instead,
simply remove all .to("cuda") occurances in eval.py.

Installation

In a first step, one should install KenLM. For Ubuntu, it should be enough to follow the installation steps
described here. The installed kenlm folder
should be move into this repo for ./create_ngram.py to function correctly. Alternatively, one can also
link the lmplz binary file to a lmplz bash command to directly run lmplz instead of ./kenlm/build/bin/lmplz.

Next, some Python dependencies should be installed. Assuming PyTorch is installed, it should be sufficient to run
pip install -r requirements.txt.

Run evaluation

Create ngram

In a first step on should create a ngram. E.g. for polish the command would be:

./create_ngram.py --language polish --path_to_ngram polish.arpa

After the language model is created, one should open the file. one should add a </s>
The file should have a structure which looks more or less as follows:

\data\        
ngram 1=86586
ngram 2=546387
ngram 3=796581           
ngram 4=843999             
ngram 5=850874              
                                                  
\1-grams:
-5.7532206      <unk>   0
0       <s>     -0.06677356                                                                            
-3.4645514      drugi   -0.2088903
...

Now it is very important also add a </s> token to the n-gram
so that it can be correctly loaded. You can simple copy the line:

0 <s> -0.06677356

and change <s> to </s>. When doing this you should also inclease ngram by 1.
The new ngram should look as follows:

\data\
ngram 1=86587
ngram 2=546387
ngram 3=796581
ngram 4=843999
ngram 5=850874

\1-grams:
-5.7532206      <unk>   0
0       <s>     -0.06677356
0       </s>     -0.06677356
-3.4645514      drugi   -0.2088903
...

Now the ngram can be correctly used with pyctcdecode

Run eval

Having created the ngram, one can run:

./eval.py --language polish --path_to_ngram polish.arpa

To compare Wav2Vec2 + LM vs. Wav2Vec2 + No LM on polish.

Results

==================================================polish==================================================
polish - No LM - | WER: 0.3069742867206763 | CER: 0.06054530156286364 | Time: 32.37423086166382
polish - With LM - | WER: 0.39526828695550076 | CER: 0.17596985266474516 | Time: 62.017329692840576

I didn’t obtain any good results even when trying out a variety of different settings for alpha and beta.
Sadly there aren’t many examples, tutorials or docs on parlance/ctcdecode
so it’s hard to find the reason for the problem.

Also tried it out for other languages like Portuguese and Spanish, but no luck there either.

GitHub

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