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

With the advent of globalization, there is an increasing demand for multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR), handling language and dialectal variation of spoken content. Recent studies show its efficacy over monolingual systems. In…

In this work, we propose a new parameter-efficient learning framework based on neural model reprogramming for cross-lingual speech recognition, which can \textbf{re-purpose} well-trained English automatic speech recognition (ASR) models to…

We present a method for transferring pre-trained self-supervised (SSL) speech representations to multiple languages. There is an abundance of unannotated speech, so creating self-supervised representations from raw audio and fine-tuning on…

This work explores fine-tuning OpenAI's Whisper automatic speech recognition (ASR) model for Amharic, a low-resource language, to improve transcription accuracy. While the foundational Whisper model struggles with Amharic due to limited…

Recent methods in speech and language technology pretrain very LARGE models which are fine-tuned for specific tasks. However, the benefits of such LARGE models are often limited to a few resource rich languages of the world. In this work,…

In this paper, we investigate the use of N-gram models and Large Pre-trained Multilingual models for Language Identification (LID) across 11 South African languages. For N-gram models, this study shows that effective data size selection…

Multilingual speech processing with self-supervised or supervised pre-trained Speech Foundation Models (SFM) has achieved strong performance on tasks like Language Identification (LID) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). However, these…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a powerful tool that allows learning of underlying representations from unlabeled data. Transformer based models such as wav2vec 2.0 and HuBERT are leading the field in the speech domain. Generally these…

Self-supervised approaches for speech representation learning are challenged by three unique problems: (1) there are multiple sound units in each input utterance, (2) there is no lexicon of input sound units during the pre-training phase,…

Multilingual speech recognition with supervised learning has achieved great results as reflected in recent research. With the development of pretraining methods on audio and text data, it is imperative to transfer the knowledge from…

Representation learning from unlabeled data has been of major interest in artificial intelligence research. While self-supervised speech representation learning has been popular in the speech research community, very few works have…

Self-supervised learning (SSL)-based speech models are extensively used for full-stack speech processing. However, it has been observed that improving SSL-based speech representations using unlabeled speech for content-related tasks is…

Language-specific pre-trained models have proven to be more accurate than multilingual ones in a monolingual evaluation setting, Arabic is no exception. However, we found that previously released Arabic BERT models were significantly…

We present first speech recognition systems for the two severely under-resourced Malian languages Bambara and Maasina Fulfulde. These systems will be used by the United Nations as part of a monitoring system to inform and support…

Self-supervised pre-trained speech models were shown effective for various downstream speech processing tasks. Since they are mainly pre-trained to map input speech to pseudo-labels, the resulting representations are only effective for the…

Pretrained language models (PLMs) for African languages are continually improving, but the reasons behind these advances remain unclear. This paper presents the first systematic investigation into probing PLMs for linguistic knowledge about…

The amount of labeled data to train models for speech tasks is limited for most languages, however, the data scarcity is exacerbated for speech translation which requires labeled data covering two different languages. To address this issue,…

We present an analysis of semi-supervised acoustic and language model training for English-isiZulu code-switched ASR using soap opera speech. Approximately 11 hours of untranscribed multilingual speech was transcribed automatically using…

One of the major challenges for developing automatic speech recognition (ASR) for low-resource languages is the limited access to labeled data with domain-specific variations. In this study, we propose a pseudo-labeling approach to develop…

Much recent work on Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) is limited in at least one of three ways: models were trained on oracle text input and neglected ASR errors, models were trained to predict only intents without the slot values, or…