Punctuation Prediction in Spontaneous Conversations: Can We Mitigate ASR Errors with Retrofitted Word Embeddings?

Lukasz Augustyniak, Piotr Szymanski, Mikolaj Morzy, Piotr Zelasko, Adrian Szymczak, Jan Mizgajski, Yishay Carmiel, Najim Dehak

Abstract: Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems introduce word errors, which often confuse punctuation prediction models, turning punctuation restoration into a challenging task. These errors usually take the form of homonyms. We show how retrofitting of the word embeddings on the domain-specific data can mitigate ASR errors. Our main contribution is a method for better alignment of homonym embeddings and the validation of the presented method on the punctuation prediction task. We record the absolute improvement in punctuation prediction accuracy between 6.2% (for question marks) to 9% (for periods) when compared with the state-of-the-art model.