Hyperparameter experiments on end-to-end automatic speech recognition*

Abstract

End-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) has achieved promising performance gains with the introduced self-attention network, Transformer. However, due to training time and the number of hyperparameters, finding the optimal hyperparameter set is computationally expensive. This paper investigates the impact of hyperparameters in the Transformer network to answer two questions: which hyperparameter plays a critical role in the task performance and training speed. The Transformer network for training has two encoder and decoder networks combined with Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC). We have trained the model with Wall Street Journal (WSJ) SI-284 and tested on devl93 and eval92. Seventeen hyperparameters were selected from the ESPnet training configuration, and varying ranges of values were used for experiments. The result shows that “num blocks” and “linear units” hyperparameters in the encoder and decoder networks reduce Word Error Rate (WER) significantly. However, performance gain is more prominent when they are altered in the encoder network. Training duration also linearly increased as “num blocks” and “linear units” hyperparameters’ values grow. Based on the experimental results, we collected the optimal values from each hyperparameter and reduced the WER up to 2.9/1.9 from dev93 and eval93 respectively. and 2.6/2.5 respectively, but 3.4/3.5, and 0.8/0.6 in the decoder network. A “dropout rate” hyperparameter in the decoder network does not act like the one in the encoder network, but it reaches the lowest WER at the value 0.1 and maintains high WER at the other values. Meaningful result is not found in “attention heads” and “self attention dropout rate”.