Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2201.09494

Data and knowledge-driven approaches for multilingual training to improve the performance of speech recognition systems of Indian languages

A. Madhavaraj·Ramakrishnan Angarai Ganesan
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

We propose data and knowledge-driven approaches for multilingual training of the automated speech recognition (ASR) system for a target language by pooling speech data from multiple source languages. Exploiting the acoustic similarities between Indian languages, we implement two approaches. In phone/senone mapping, deep neural network (DNN) learns to map senones or phones from one language to the others, and the transcriptions of the source languages are modified such that they can be used along with the target language data to train and fine-tune the target language ASR system. In the other approach, we model the acoustic information for all the languages simultaneously by training a multitask DNN (MTDNN) to predict the senones of each language in different output layers. The cross-entropy loss and the weight update procedure are modified such that only the shared layers and the output layer responsible for predicting the senone classes of a language are updated during training, if the feature vector belongs to that particular language. In the low-resource setting (LRS), 40 hours of transcribed data each for Tamil, Telugu and Gujarati languages are used for training. The DNN based senone mapping technique gives relative improvements in word error rates (WER) of 9.66%, 7.2% and 15.21% over the baseline system for Tamil, Gujarati and Telugu languages, respectively. In medium-resourced setting (MRS), 160, 275 and 135 hours of data for Tamil, Kannada and Hindi languages are used, where, the same technique gives better relative improvements of 13.94%, 10.28% and 27.24% for Tamil, Kannada and Hindi, respectively. The MTDNN with senone mapping based training in LRS, gives higher relative WER improvements of 15.0%, 17.54% and 16.06%, respectively for Tamil, Gujarati and Telugu, whereas in MRS, we see improvements of 21.24% 21.05% and 30.17% for Tamil, Kannada and Hindi languages, respectively.

Explore related subjects

eess.AScs.CLcs.SD

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

A. Madhavaraj, Ramakrishnan Angarai Ganesan. 2022-01-24. Data and knowledge-driven approaches for multilingual training to improve the performance of speech recognition systems of Indian languages. https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.09494

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Diarization Error Decomposition Under Pause Annotation Ambiguity

Speaker diarization evaluation is sensitive to ambiguity in pause annotation, which can inflate diarization error rate (DER) or obscure genuine model errors. We show that morphological closing, which has been used for pause-tolerant diarization evaluation, discards segment-level distinctions. Instead, we propose an exact, overlap-aware decomposition of standard DER into a pause-attributable component, consisting of errors compatible with pause filling, and a residual core component that can serve as a proxy for intrinsic diarization errors. The decomposition leaves DER unchanged, while the pause-attributable and core components vary monotonically with the pause threshold and eventually saturate. Experiments spanning synthetic transformations, annotation mismatch, cross-domain evaluation, and tight-boundary diarization show that the decomposition reveals error sources not apparent from standard DER.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2026

Less can be More: What Aspects of Speech Drive End-of-Turn Detection

In conversational AI, detecting when a speaker has finished talking is crucial for natural turn taking. While recent work incorporates semantics, the relative contribution of different modalities remains unclear. We present a controlled ablation of acoustic, prosodic, and semantic signals for streaming end of turn detection using a lightweight trimodal classifier. Under identical training conditions, the acoustic prosodic combination achieves the best balance of accuracy and latency, achieving utterance F1 of 0.93 with 7.8% false alarms at 400ms median latency. Adding text increases premature detections without improving performance. Feature space analysis confirms that prosodic features have the strongest class separability, while text representations overlap substantially. These findings suggest that turn-taking is primarily conveyed through intonation and silence patterns rather than semantic completeness, enabling faster and more reliable systems without expensive text inference.

eess.AS↗
arXiv2026

Downstream-Task-Aware Unified Source Separation

Task-aware unified source separation (TUSS) enables a single model to handle diverse separation tasks by conditioning on input prompts. However, conventional TUSS does not account for downstream task requirements, such as whether the enhanced speech will be used for human listening or automatic speech recognition (ASR). In this paper, we propose a prompt extension framework for TUSS that incorporates downstream task information into the input prompts and switches the loss function according to the given prompt during training, enabling outputs with different signal characteristics at inference time. Specifically, we introduce an ASR-dedicated prompt paired with a regularized loss function that reduces speech artifacts to improve ASR robustness, while the standard prompt is paired with the conventional SNR loss function. Experiments on the LibriSpeech and JNAS corpora demonstrate that the proposed joint-training scheme enables a single model to improve ASR performance over noisy input across a wide range of SNR conditions by selecting the ASR-dedicated prompt, while maintaining general speech enhancement quality when the standard prompt is used.

eess.AS↗