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

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2021-09
Main Authors: Poncelet, Jakob, Hugo Van hamme
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Automatic speech recognition
Speech processing
Training
Voice recognition
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2331-8422