Pitch Accent Detection improves Pretrained Automatic Speech Recognition

David Sasu; Natalie Schluter

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arXiv · 2508.04814

Pitch Accent Detection improves Pretrained Automatic Speech Recognition

David Sasu·Natalie Schluter

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Abstract

We show the performance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems that use semi-supervised speech representations can be boosted by a complimentary pitch accent detection module, by introducing a joint ASR and pitch accent detection model. The pitch accent detection component of our model achieves a significant improvement on the state-of-the-art for the task, closing the gap in F1-score by 41%. Additionally, the ASR performance in joint training decreases WER by 28.3% on LibriSpeech, under limited resource fine-tuning. With these results, we show the importance of extending pretrained speech models to retain or re-learn important prosodic cues such as pitch accent.

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BibTeX RIS

David Sasu, Natalie Schluter. 2025-08-06. Pitch Accent Detection improves Pretrained Automatic Speech Recognition. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04814

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