Optimizing Byte-level Representation for End-to-End ASR

In this paper, we propose an algorithm to optimize a byte-level representation for end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR). Byte-level representation is often used by large scale multilingual ASR systems when the character set of the supported languages is large. The compactness and universality of byte-level representation allow the ASR models to use smaller output and therefore, provides more flexibility. UTF-8 is the most commonly used byte-level representation and has been successfully applied to ASR. However, it is not designed for ASR or any machine learning tasks. By using…