Non causal deep learning based dereverberation

Abstract: In this paper we demonstrate the effectiveness of non-causal context for mitigating the effects of reverberation in deep-learning-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. First, the value of non-causal context using a non-causal FIR filter is shown by comparing the contributions of previous vs. future information. Second, MLP- and LSTM-based dereverberation networks were trained to confirm the effects of causal and non-causal context when used in ASR systems trained with clean speech. The non-causal deep-learning-based dereverberation provides a 45% relative reduction in word error rate (WER) compared to the popular weighted prediction error (WPE) method in experiments with clean training in the REVERB challenge. Finally, an expanded multicondition training procedure used in combination with a semi-enhanced test utterance generation based on combinations of reverberated and dereverberated signals is proposed to reduce any artifacts or distortion that may be introduced by the non-causal dereverberation methods. The combination of both approaches provided average relative reductions in WER equal to 10.9% and 6.0% when compared to the baseline system obtained with the most recent REVERB challenge recipe without and with WPE, respectively.