Source separation can improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) under multi-party meeting scenarios by extracting single-speaker signals from overlapped speech. Despite the success of self-supervised learning models in single-channel source separation, most studies have focused on simulated setups. In this paper, seven SSL models were compared on both simulated and real-world corpora. Then, we propose to integrate the best-performing model WavLM into an automatic transcription system through a novel iterative source selection method. To improve real-world performance, time-domain unsupervised mixture invariant training was adapted to the time-frequency domain. Experiments showed that in the transcription system when source separation was inserted before an ASR model fine-tuned on separated speech, absolute reductions of 1.9% and 1.5% in concatenated minimum-permutation word error rate for an unknown number of speakers (cpWER-us) were observed on the AMI dev and test sets.
@article{arxiv.2304.00871,
title = {Self-Supervised Learning-Based Source Separation for Meeting Data},
author = {Yuang Li and Xianrui Zheng and Philip C. Woodland},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.00871},
year = {2023}
}