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Main Authors: San, Nay, Paraskevopoulos, Georgios, Arora, Aryaman, He, Xiluo, Kaur, Prabhjot, Adams, Oliver, Jurafsky, Dan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02302
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author San, Nay
Paraskevopoulos, Georgios
Arora, Aryaman
He, Xiluo
Kaur, Prabhjot
Adams, Oliver
Jurafsky, Dan
author_facet San, Nay
Paraskevopoulos, Georgios
Arora, Aryaman
He, Xiluo
Kaur, Prabhjot
Adams, Oliver
Jurafsky, Dan
contents While massively multilingual speech models like wav2vec 2.0 XLSR-128 can be directly fine-tuned for automatic speech recognition (ASR), downstream performance can still be relatively poor on languages that are under-represented in the pre-training data. Continued pre-training on 70-200 hours of untranscribed speech in these languages can help -- but what about languages without that much recorded data? For such cases, we show that supplementing the target language with data from a similar, higher-resource 'donor' language can help. For example, continued pre-training on only 10 hours of low-resource Punjabi supplemented with 60 hours of donor Hindi is almost as good as continued pretraining on 70 hours of Punjabi. By contrast, sourcing data from less similar donors like Bengali does not improve ASR performance. To inform donor language selection, we propose a novel similarity metric based on the sequence distribution of induced acoustic units: the Acoustic Token Distribution Similarity (ATDS). Across a set of typologically different target languages (Punjabi, Galician, Iban, Setswana), we show that the ATDS between the target language and its candidate donors precisely predicts target language ASR performance.
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Predicting positive transfer for improved low-resource speech recognition using acoustic pseudo-tokens
San, Nay
Paraskevopoulos, Georgios
Arora, Aryaman
He, Xiluo
Kaur, Prabhjot
Adams, Oliver
Jurafsky, Dan
Audio and Speech Processing
Computation and Language
While massively multilingual speech models like wav2vec 2.0 XLSR-128 can be directly fine-tuned for automatic speech recognition (ASR), downstream performance can still be relatively poor on languages that are under-represented in the pre-training data. Continued pre-training on 70-200 hours of untranscribed speech in these languages can help -- but what about languages without that much recorded data? For such cases, we show that supplementing the target language with data from a similar, higher-resource 'donor' language can help. For example, continued pre-training on only 10 hours of low-resource Punjabi supplemented with 60 hours of donor Hindi is almost as good as continued pretraining on 70 hours of Punjabi. By contrast, sourcing data from less similar donors like Bengali does not improve ASR performance. To inform donor language selection, we propose a novel similarity metric based on the sequence distribution of induced acoustic units: the Acoustic Token Distribution Similarity (ATDS). Across a set of typologically different target languages (Punjabi, Galician, Iban, Setswana), we show that the ATDS between the target language and its candidate donors precisely predicts target language ASR performance.
title Predicting positive transfer for improved low-resource speech recognition using acoustic pseudo-tokens
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.02302