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An End-to-End Conformer-Based Speech Recognition Model for Mandarin Radiotelephony Communications in Civil Aviation

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Biometric Recognition (CCBR 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13628))

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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.

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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).

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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

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-20233-9_34

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

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  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-20233-9

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