Zero Shot Text to Speech Augmentation for Automatic Speech Recognition on Low-Resource Accented Speech Corpora

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nespoli, Francesco, Barreda, Daniel, Naylor, Patrick A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Nespoli, Francesco
Barreda, Daniel
Naylor, Patrick A.
author_facet Nespoli, Francesco
Barreda, Daniel
Naylor, Patrick A.
contents In recent years, automatic speech recognition (ASR) models greatly improved transcription performance both in clean, low noise, acoustic conditions and in reverberant environments. However, all these systems rely on the availability of hundreds of hours of labelled training data in specific acoustic conditions. When such a training dataset is not available, the performance of the system is heavily impacted. For example, this happens when a specific acoustic environment or a particular population of speakers is under-represented in the training dataset. Specifically, in this paper we investigate the effect of accented speech data on an off-the-shelf ASR system. Furthermore, we suggest a strategy based on zero-shot text-to-speech to augment the accented speech corpora. We show that this augmentation method is able to mitigate the loss in performance of the ASR system on accented data up to 5% word error rate reduction (WERR). In conclusion, we demonstrate that by incorporating a modest fraction of real with synthetically generated data, the ASR system exhibits superior performance compared to a model trained exclusively on authentic accented speech with up to 14% WERR.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_11107
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Zero Shot Text to Speech Augmentation for Automatic Speech Recognition on Low-Resource Accented Speech Corpora
Nespoli, Francesco
Barreda, Daniel
Naylor, Patrick A.
Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
In recent years, automatic speech recognition (ASR) models greatly improved transcription performance both in clean, low noise, acoustic conditions and in reverberant environments. However, all these systems rely on the availability of hundreds of hours of labelled training data in specific acoustic conditions. When such a training dataset is not available, the performance of the system is heavily impacted. For example, this happens when a specific acoustic environment or a particular population of speakers is under-represented in the training dataset. Specifically, in this paper we investigate the effect of accented speech data on an off-the-shelf ASR system. Furthermore, we suggest a strategy based on zero-shot text-to-speech to augment the accented speech corpora. We show that this augmentation method is able to mitigate the loss in performance of the ASR system on accented data up to 5% word error rate reduction (WERR). In conclusion, we demonstrate that by incorporating a modest fraction of real with synthetically generated data, the ASR system exhibits superior performance compared to a model trained exclusively on authentic accented speech with up to 14% WERR.
title Zero Shot Text to Speech Augmentation for Automatic Speech Recognition on Low-Resource Accented Speech Corpora
topic Audio and Speech Processing
Sound
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11107