  We propose a novel approach to semi-supervised automatic speech recognition
(ASR). We first exploit a large amount of unlabeled audio data via
representation learning, where we reconstruct a temporal slice of filterbank
features from past and future context frames. The resulting deep contextualized
acoustic representations (DeCoAR) are then used to train a CTC-based end-to-end
ASR system using a smaller amount of labeled audio data. In our experiments, we
show that systems trained on DeCoAR consistently outperform ones trained on
conventional filterbank features, giving 42% and 19% relative improvement over
the baseline on WSJ eval92 and LibriSpeech test-clean, respectively. Our
approach can drastically reduce the amount of labeled data required;
unsupervised training on LibriSpeech then supervision with 100 hours of labeled
data achieves performance on par with training on all 960 hours directly.
Pre-trained models and code will be released online.
