Low-resource accented speech recognition is one of the important challenges faced by current ASR technology in practical applications. In this study, we propose a Conformer-based architecture, called Aformer, to leverage both the acoustic information from large non-accented and limited accented training data. Specifically, a general encoder and an accent encoder are designed in the Aformer to extract complementary acoustic information. Moreover, we propose to train the Aformer in a multi-pass manner, and investigate three cross-information fusion methods to effectively combine the information from both general and accent encoders. All experiments are conducted on both the accented English and Mandarin ASR tasks. Results show that our proposed methods outperform the strong Conformer baseline by relative 10.2% to 24.5% word/character error rate reduction on six in-domain and out-of-domain accented test sets.
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