Gated ConvNets for Letter-Based ASR
In this paper we introduce a new speech recognition system, leveraging a simple letter-based ConvNet acoustic model. The acoustic model requires only audio transcription for training -- no alignment annotations, nor any forced alignment step is needed. At inference, our decoder takes only a word list and a language model, and is fed with letter scores from the acoustic model -- no phonetic word lexicon is needed. Key ingredients for the acoustic model are Gated Linear Units and high dropout. We show near state-of-the-art results in word error rate on the LibriSpeech corpus with MFSC features, both on the clean and other configurations.
 The paper describes some interesting work but for a combination of reasons I think it*s more like a workshop-track paper. There is not much that*s technically new in the paper-- at least not much that*s really understandable. There is some text about a variant of CTC, but it does not explain very clearly what was done or what the motivation was. There are also quite a few misspellings. Since the system is presented without any comparisons to alternatives for any of the individual components, it doesn*t really shed any light on the significance of the various modeling decisions that were made. That limits the value. If rejected from here, it could perhaps be submitted as an ICASSP or Interspeech paper.
You are a member of the scientific community tasked with peer review. Review the following paper title and abstract.
### Title + Abstract
Gated ConvNets for Letter-Based ASR
In this paper we introduce a new speech recognition system, leveraging a simple letter-based ConvNet acoustic model. The acoustic model requires only audio transcription for training -- no alignment annotations, nor any forced alignment step is needed. At inference, our decoder takes only a word list and a language model, and is fed with letter scores from the acoustic model -- no phonetic word lexicon is needed. Key ingredients for the acoustic model are Gated Linear Units and high dropout. We show near state-of-the-art results in word error rate on the LibriSpeech corpus with MFSC features, both on the clean and other configurations.
user
<think>Okay, to do a decent peer review, I should start with summarizing what the work is about. This includes novelty, contributions, clarity, and impact. I might include suggestions to issues that I find critical to the usefulness of the work. Starting with novelty, there are different types of novelty. The first aspect of novelty is scope and scale. Is the work covering a broader perspective than previous works? The second aspect is methodology. Is the proposed methodology novel compared to previous methods? Do they provide any significant advantage over previous methodologies? The third aspect is results. Are the results different compared previous work? Does this lead to any novel theories or an extension of current theories? Next is clarity, I will be reading the work in depth and analyze if any sentences can be potentially ambiguous or misleading. If any sentences are ambiguous, I will state them and give a suggestion on how to rephrase such sentence or how to make more clear to the audience. Lastly, impact is important. I will attempt to predict how such work will impact the scientific community. This might include the applications of such work and how the work might transform the way we study a certain topic. Finally, I will might only mention issues that are critical. This is to keep the review as concise and helpful as possible.</think>



 The paper describes some interesting work but for a combination of reasons I think it*s more like a workshop-track paper. There is not much that*s technically new in the paper-- at least not much that*s really understandable. There is some text about a variant of CTC, but it does not explain very clearly what was done or what the motivation was. There are also quite a few misspellings. Since the system is presented without any comparisons to alternatives for any of the individual components, it doesn*t really shed any light on the significance of the various modeling decisions that were made. That limits the value. If rejected from here, it could perhaps be submitted as an ICASSP or Interspeech paper.
assistant
 The paper describes some interesting work but for a combination of reasons I think it*s more like a workshop-track paper. There is not much that*s technically new in the paper-- at least not much that*s really understandable. There is some text about a variant of CTC, but it does not explain very clearly what was done or what the motivation was. There are also quite a few misspellings. Since the system is presented without any comparisons to alternatives for any of the individual components, it doesn*t really shed any light on the significance of the various modeling decisions that were made. That limits the value. If rejected from here, it could perhaps be submitted as an ICASSP or Interspeech paper.