Four-in-One: A Joint Approach to Inverse Text Normalization, Punctuation, Capitalization, and Disfluency for Automatic Speech Recognition
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Features such as punctuation, capitalization, and formatting of entities are important for readability, understanding, and natural language processing tasks. However, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems produce spoken-form text devoid of formatting, and tagging approaches to formatting address just one or two features at a time. In this paper, we unify spoken-to-written text conversion via a two-stage process: First, we use a single transformer tagging model to jointly produce token-level tags for inverse text normalization (ITN), punctuation, capitalization, and disfluencies. Then, we apply the tags to generate written-form text and use weighted finite state transducer (WFST) grammars to format tagged ITN entity spans. Despite joining four models into one, our unified tagging approach matches or outperforms task-specific models across all four tasks on benchmark test sets across several domains.
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