- Shinji Watanabe, Takaaki Hori, Shigeki Karita, Tomoki Hayashi, Jiro Nishitoba, Y. Unno, Nelson Yalta, Jahn Heymann, Matthew Wiesner, Nanxin Chen, Adithya Renduchintala, Tsubasa Ochiai. 2018. ESPnet: End-to-End Speech Processing Toolkit. Abstract: This paper introduces a new open source platform for end-to-end speech processing named ESPnet. ESPnet mainly focuses on end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR), and adopts widely-used dynamic neural network toolkits, Chainer and PyTorch, as a main deep learning engine. ESPnet also follows the Kaldi ASR toolkit style for data processing, feature extraction/format, and recipes to provide a complete setup for speech recognition and other speech processing experiments. This paper explains a major architecture of this software platform, several important functionalities, which differentiate ESPnet from other open source ASR toolkits, and experimental results with major ASR benchmarks.
