This paper explores the use of Dutch archival television broadcast data for self-supervised learning of speech foundation models, specifically wav2vec 2.0. We first study data quality assumptions for pre-training, and show how music, noise and speaker overlap affect SSL convergence and downstream fine-tuning performance. Secondly, we explore effectively pre-processing strategies to convert the noisy broadcast dataset into a qualitative dataset for pre-training, by using Whisper and WhisperX. Thirdly, we compare mono-lingual and multi-lingual pre-training with equivalent amounts of data, and show that mono-lingual pre-training is more robust to out-of-domain data. Lastly, we achieve a state-of-the-art LARGE wav2vec 2.0 model for the Dutch language, by a continuation of pre-training a wav2vec 2.0 XLS-R model checkpoint with our 55k hour archival dataset.
@article{arxiv.2507.04554,
title = {Self-supervised learning of speech representations with Dutch archival data},
author = {Nik Vaessen and Roeland Ordelman and David A. van Leeuwen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2507.04554},
year = {2025}
}