English

Unsupervised Active Learning: Optimizing Labeling Cost-Effectiveness for Automatic Speech Recognition

Audio and Speech Processing 2023-08-30 v1 Sound

Abstract

In recent years, speech-based self-supervised learning (SSL) has made significant progress in various tasks, including automatic speech recognition (ASR). An ASR model with decent performance can be realized by fine-tuning an SSL model with a small fraction of labeled data. Reducing the demand for labeled data is always of great practical value. In this paper, we further extend the use of SSL to cut down labeling costs with active learning. Three types of units on different granularities are derived from speech signals in an unsupervised way, and their effects are compared by applying a contrastive data selection method. The experimental results show that our proposed data selection framework can effectively improve the word error rate (WER) by more than 11% with the same amount of labeled data, or halve the labeling cost while maintaining the same WER, compared to random selection.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2308.14814,
  title  = {Unsupervised Active Learning: Optimizing Labeling Cost-Effectiveness for Automatic Speech Recognition},
  author = {Zhisheng Zheng and Ziyang Ma and Yu Wang and Xie Chen},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.14814},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

5 pages, 3 figures. Accepted to Interspeech 2023

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:06:35.775Z