Windowed Attention Mechanisms for Speech Recognition

The usual attention mechanisms used for encoder-decoder models do not constrain the relationship between input and output sequences to be monotonic. To address this we explore windowed attention mechanisms which restrict attention to a block of source hidden states. Rule-based windowing restricts attention to a (typically large) fixed-length window. The performance of such methods is poor if the window size is small. In this paper, we propose a fully-trainable windowed attention and provide a detailed analysis on the factors which affect the performance of such an attention mechanism. Compared to the rule-based window methods, the learned window size is significantly smaller yet the model's performance is competitive. On the TIMIT corpus this approach has resulted in a 17% (relative) performance improvement over the traditional attention model. Our model also yields comparable accuracies to the joint CTC-attention model on the Wall Street Journal corpus.