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.
@article{arxiv.2109.14357,
title = {Comparison of Self-Supervised Speech Pre-Training Methods on Flemish Dutch},
author = {Jakob Poncelet and Hugo Van hamme},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.14357},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
To be published in the 2021 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU 2021)