Related papers: Africa-Centric Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Mu…

Self-supervised pre-training could effectively improve the performance of low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, existing self-supervised pre-training are task-agnostic, i.e., could be applied to various downstream tasks.…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) speech models such as wav2vec and HuBERT have demonstrated state-of-the-art performance on automatic speech recognition (ASR) and proved to be extremely useful in low label-resource settings. However, the…

Multilingual BERT (mBERT) trained on 104 languages has shown surprisingly good cross-lingual performance on several NLP tasks, even without explicit cross-lingual signals. However, these evaluations have focused on cross-lingual transfer…

Self-supervised learning leverages unlabeled data effectively, improving label efficiency and generalization to domains without labeled data. While recent work has studied generalization to more acoustic/linguistic domains, languages, and…

AfriVoices-KE is a large-scale multilingual speech dataset comprising approximately 3,000 hours of audio across five Kenyan languages: Dholuo, Kikuyu, Kalenjin, Maasai, and Somali. The dataset includes 750 hours of scripted speech and 2,250…

Pretrained contextualized text representation models learn an effective representation of a natural language to make it machine understandable. After the breakthrough of the attention mechanism, a new generation of pretrained models have…

We present a cost-effective approach for developing Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for low-resource languages like Ika. We fine-tune the pretrained wav2vec 2.0 Massively Multilingual Speech Models on a high-quality speech dataset…

Whisper is a multitask and multilingual speech model covering 99 languages. It yields commendable automatic speech recognition (ASR) results in a subset of its covered languages, but the model still underperforms on a non-negligible number…

This paper describes our RoyalFlush system for the track of multi-speaker automatic speech recognition (ASR) in the M2MeT challenge. We adopted the serialized output training (SOT) based multi-speakers ASR system with large-scale simulation…

Creating speech datasets, models, and evaluation frameworks for low-resource languages remains challenging given the lack of a broad base of pertinent experience to draw from. This paper reports on the field collection of 612 hours of…

The use of multilingual language models for tasks in low and high-resource languages has been a success story in deep learning. In recent times, Arabic has been receiving widespread attention on account of its dialectal variance. While…

This work investigates the use of large-scale, English-only pre-trained models (CLIP and HuBERT) for multilingual image-speech retrieval. For non-English image-speech retrieval, we outperform the current state-of-the-art performance by a…

Despite rapid progress in the recent past, current speech recognition systems still require labeled training data which limits this technology to a small fraction of the languages spoken around the globe. This paper describes wav2vec-U,…

Sequence-to-sequence (seq2seq) approach for low-resource ASR is a relatively new direction in speech research. The approach benefits by performing model training without using lexicon and alignments. However, this poses a new problem of…

Using representations provided by a large pre-trained model has become the primary strategy for achieving state-of-the-art results in a wide range of tasks. A recently proposed large pre-trained model, wav2vec 2.0, was seminal for several…

There exist three approaches for multilingual and crosslingual automatic speech recognition (MCL-ASR) - supervised pretraining with phonetic or graphemic transcription, and self-supervised pretraining. We find that pretraining with phonetic…

Large pre-trained speech models excel in downstream tasks but their deployment is impractical for resource-limited environments. In this paper, we introduce HArnESS, the first Arabic-centric self-supervised speech model family, designed to…

A crucial part of an accurate and reliable spoken language assessment system is the underlying ASR model. Recently, large-scale pre-trained ASR foundation models such as Whisper have been made available. As the output of these models is…

Motivated by the success of masked language modeling~(MLM) in pre-training natural language processing models, we propose w2v-BERT that explores MLM for self-supervised speech representation learning. w2v-BERT is a framework that combines…

This research addresses the problem of acoustic modeling of low-resource languages for which transcribed training data is absent. The goal is to learn robust frame-level feature representations that can be used to identify and distinguish…