Taiwanese Hokkien is declining in use and status due to a language shift towards Mandarin in Taiwan. This is partly why it is a low resource language in NLP and speech research today. To ensure that the state of the art in speech processing does not leave Taiwanese Hokkien behind, we contribute a 1.5-hour dataset of Taiwanese Hokkien to ML-SUPERB's hidden set. Evaluating ML-SUPERB's suite of self-supervised learning (SSL) speech representations on our dataset, we find that model size does not consistently determine performance. In fact, certain smaller models outperform larger ones. Furthermore, linguistic alignment between pretraining data and the target language plays a crucial role.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2312.06668,
title = {Evaluating Self-supervised Speech Models on a Taiwanese Hokkien Corpus},
author = {Yi-Hui Chou and Kalvin Chang and Meng-Ju Wu and Winston Ou and Alice Wen-Hsin Bi and Carol Yang and Bryan Y. Chen and Rong-Wei Pai and Po-Yen Yeh and Jo-Peng Chiang and Iu-Tshian Phoann and Winnie Chang and Chenxuan Cui and Noel Chen and Jiatong Shi},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.06668},
year = {2023}
}