Unsupervised ASR via Cross-Lingual Pseudo-Labeling

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Likhomanenko, Tatiana, Lugosch, Loren, Collobert, Ronan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Likhomanenko, Tatiana
Lugosch, Loren
Collobert, Ronan
author_facet Likhomanenko, Tatiana
Lugosch, Loren
Collobert, Ronan
contents Recent work has shown that it is possible to train an $\textit{unsupervised}$ automatic speech recognition (ASR) system using only unpaired audio and text. Existing unsupervised ASR methods assume that no labeled data can be used for training. We argue that even if one does not have any labeled audio for a given language, there is $\textit{always}$ labeled data available for other languages. We show that it is possible to use character-level acoustic models (AMs) from other languages to bootstrap an $\textit{unsupervised}$ AM in a new language. Here, "unsupervised" means no labeled audio is available for the $\textit{target}$ language. Our approach is based on two key ingredients: (i) generating pseudo-labels (PLs) of the $\textit{target}$ language using some $\textit{other}$ language AM and (ii) constraining these PLs with a $\textit{target language model}$. Our approach is effective on Common Voice: e.g. transfer of English AM to Swahili achieves 18% WER. It also outperforms character-based wav2vec-U 2.0 by 15% absolute WER on LJSpeech with 800h of labeled German data instead of 60k hours of unlabeled English data.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_13330
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unsupervised ASR via Cross-Lingual Pseudo-Labeling
Likhomanenko, Tatiana
Lugosch, Loren
Collobert, Ronan
Audio and Speech Processing
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Sound
Recent work has shown that it is possible to train an $\textit{unsupervised}$ automatic speech recognition (ASR) system using only unpaired audio and text. Existing unsupervised ASR methods assume that no labeled data can be used for training. We argue that even if one does not have any labeled audio for a given language, there is $\textit{always}$ labeled data available for other languages. We show that it is possible to use character-level acoustic models (AMs) from other languages to bootstrap an $\textit{unsupervised}$ AM in a new language. Here, "unsupervised" means no labeled audio is available for the $\textit{target}$ language. Our approach is based on two key ingredients: (i) generating pseudo-labels (PLs) of the $\textit{target}$ language using some $\textit{other}$ language AM and (ii) constraining these PLs with a $\textit{target language model}$. Our approach is effective on Common Voice: e.g. transfer of English AM to Swahili achieves 18% WER. It also outperforms character-based wav2vec-U 2.0 by 15% absolute WER on LJSpeech with 800h of labeled German data instead of 60k hours of unlabeled English data.
title Unsupervised ASR via Cross-Lingual Pseudo-Labeling
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13330