Abstract
In civil aviation radiotelephony communications, misunderstandings between air traffic controllers and flight crews can result in serious aviation accidents. Automatic semantic verification is a promising assistant solution to decrease miscommunication, thanks to advancements in speech and language processing. Unfortunately, existing general speech recognition models are ineffective when it comes to capturing contextual long-distance dependent local similarity features in radiotelephony communications. To address these problems, this paper proposes an end-to-end Conformer-based multi-task learning speech recognition model for Mandarin radiotelephony communications in civil aviation. The Conformer model improves local information capture while retaining the global information modeling capabilities of contextual long-distance dependencies, owing to the introduction of the convolution module to the Transformer model. Meanwhile, multi-task learning is used to further improve performance by combining connectionist temporal classification (CTC) and attention-based encoder-decoder (AED) models. The experimental results show that the proposed model can perform global and local acoustic modeling effectively, making it particularly suitable for extracting acoustic features of Mandarin civil aviation radiotelephony communications.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Prinzo, O.V., Morrow, D.G.: Improving pilot/air traffic control voice communication in general aviation. Int. J. Aviat. Psychol. 12(4), 341–357 (2002)
Lahtinen, T.M., Huttunen, K.H., Kuronen, P.O., Sorri, M.J., Leino, T.K.: Radio speech communication problems reported in a survey of military pilots. Aviat. Space Environ. Med. 81(12), 1123–1127 (2010)
Jia, G., Cheng, F., Yang, J., Li, D.: Intelligent checking model of Chinese radiotelephony read-backs in civil aviation air traffic control. Chin. J. Aeronaut. 31(12), 2280–2289 (2018)
Lu, Y., Shi, Y., Jia, G., Yang, J.: A new method for semantic consistency verification of aviation radiotelephony communication based on LSTM-RNN. In: 2016 IEEE International Conference on Digital Signal Processing (DSP), pp. 422–426. IEEE Press, New York (2016)
Illman, P.E., Gailey, G.: Pilot’s Radio communications Handbook, 6th edn. McGraw-Hill Professional (2012)
Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., et al.: Attention is all you need. In: NIPS 2017, pp. 6000–6010. Red Hook, New York (2017)
Gulati, A., Qin, J., Chiu, C.C., et al.: Conformer: convolution-augmented transformer for speech recognition. In: Proceedings Interspeech 2020, pp. 5036–5040 (2020)
Jelinek, F.: Continuous speech recognition by statistical methods. Proc. IEEE 64(4), 532–556 (1976)
Juang, B.H.: Maximum-likelihood estimation for mixture multivariate stochastic observations of Markov chains. AT&T Techn. J. 64(6), 1235–1249 (1985)
Hinton, G., Deng, L., Yu, D., et al.: Deep neural networks for acoustic modeling in speech recognition: the shared views of four research groups. IEEE Signal Process. Mag. 29(6), 82–97 (2012)
Li, J.: Recent advances in end-to-end automatic speech recognition. arXiv preprint arXiv: 2111.01690 (2022)
Hannun, A.: The history of speech recognition to the year 2030. arXiv preprint arXiv: 2108.00084 (2021)
Graves, A., Fernandez, S., Gomez, F., Schmidhuber, J.: Connectionist temporal classification: labelling unsegmented sequence data with recurrent neural networks. In: 23rd International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 369–376 (2006)
Graves, A.: Connectionist temporal classification. In: Supervised Sequence Labelling with Recurrent Neural Networks. Studies in Computational Intelligence. LNCS, vol. 385, pp. 61–93. Springer, Heidelberg (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24797-2_7
Graves, A.: Sequence transduction with recurrent neural networks. arXiv preprint arXiv: 1211.3711 (2012)
Chan, W., Jaitly, N., Le, Q., Vinyals, O.: Listen, attend and spell: a neural network for large vocabulary conversational speech recognition. In: 2016 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP), pp. 4960–4964 (2016)
Chorowski, J., Bahdanau, D., Serdyuk, D., Cho, K., Bengio, Y.: Attention-based models for speech recognition. In: 28th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, pp. 577–585 (2015)
Liu, Y., Guo, X., Zhang, H., Yang, J.: An acoustic model of civil aviation’s radiotelephony communication. In: 8th International Conference on Computing and Pattern Recognition (ICCPR 2019), pp. 315–319 (2019)
Qiu, Y., Jia, G., Yang, J., Liu, Y.: Speech recognition model of civil aviation radiotelephony communication based on BiLSTM. J. Sig. Process. 35(02), 293–300 (2019). (in Chinese)
Zhou, K., Yang, Q., Sun, X., Liu, S., Lu, J.: Improved CTC-attention based end-to-end speech recognition on air traffic control. In: Cui, Z., Pan, J., Zhang, S., Xiao, L., Yang, J. (eds.) IScIDE 2019. LNCS, vol. 11936, pp. 187–196. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36204-1_15
Yu, D., Deng, L., Yu, K., Qian, Y.: Artificial Intelligence Speech Recognition Understanding and Practice. Publishing House of Electronics Industry, Beijing (2020).(in Chinese)
Povey, D., Ghoshal, A., Boulianne, G., et al.: The Kaldi speech recognition toolkit. In: 2011 IEEE Workshop on Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding (ASRU 2011). IEEE Signal Processing Society (2011)
Dai, Z., Yang, Z., Yang, Y., Carbonell, J., Le, Q., Salakhutdinov, R.: Transformer-XL: attentive language models beyond a fixed-length context. In: 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pp. 2978–2988 (2019)
Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by the General Higher Education Project of Guangdong Provincial Education Department (No. 2020ZDZX3085), in part by China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2021M703371), in part by the Post-doctoral Foundation Project of Shenzhen Polytechnic (No. 6021330002K), and in part by Shenzhen Science and Technology Program (No. RCBS20200714114940262).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Shi, Y., Ma, G., Ren, J., Zhang, H., Yang, J. (2022). An End-to-End Conformer-Based Speech Recognition Model for Mandarin Radiotelephony Communications in Civil Aviation. In: Deng, W., et al. Biometric Recognition. CCBR 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13628. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20233-9_34
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20233-9_34
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-20232-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-20233-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)