  Acoustics-to-word models are end-to-end speech recognizers that use words as
targets without relying on pronunciation dictionaries or graphemes. These
models are notoriously difficult to train due to the lack of linguistic
knowledge. It is also unclear how the amount of training data impacts the
optimization and generalization of such models. In this work, we study the
optimization and generalization of acoustics-to-word models under different
amounts of training data. In addition, we study three types of inductive bias,
leveraging a pronunciation dictionary, word boundary annotations, and
constraints on word durations. We find that constraining word durations leads
to the most improvement. Finally, we analyze the word embedding space learned
by the model, and find that the space has a structure dominated by the
pronunciation of words. This suggests that the contexts of words, instead of
their phonetic structure, should be the future focus of inductive bias in
acoustics-to-word models.
