Comparison of Self-Supervised Speech Pre-Training Methods on Flemish Dutch

Jakob Poncelet; Hugo Van hamme

doi:10.1109/asru51503.2021.9688061

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arXiv · 2109.14357

Comparison of Self-Supervised Speech Pre-Training Methods on Flemish Dutch

Jakob Poncelet·Hugo Van hamme

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Abstract

Recent research in speech processing exhibits a growing interest in unsupervised and self-supervised representation learning from unlabelled data to alleviate the need for large amounts of annotated data. We investigate several popular pre-training methods and apply them to Flemish Dutch. We compare off-the-shelf English pre-trained models to models trained on an increasing amount of Flemish data. We find that the most important factors for positive transfer to downstream speech recognition tasks include a substantial amount of data and a matching pre-training domain. Ideally, we also finetune on an annotated subset in the target language. All pre-trained models improve linear phone separability in Flemish, but not all methods improve Automatic Speech Recognition. We experience superior performance with wav2vec 2.0 and we obtain a 30% WER improvement by finetuning the multilingually pre-trained XLSR-53 model on Flemish Dutch, after integration into an HMM-DNN acoustic model.

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Jakob Poncelet, Hugo Van hamme. 2021-09-29. Comparison of Self-Supervised Speech Pre-Training Methods on Flemish Dutch. https://doi.org/10.1109/asru51503.2021.9688061

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