Related papers: AfriHuBERT: A self-supervised speech representatio…

We present the first self-supervised multilingual speech model trained exclusively on African speech. The model learned from nearly 60 000 hours of unlabeled speech segments in 21 languages and dialects spoken in sub-Saharan Africa. On the…

We present mHuBERT-147, the first general-purpose massively multilingual HuBERT speech representation model trained on 90K hours of clean, open-license data. To scale up the multi-iteration HuBERT approach, we use faiss-based clustering,…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for African languages remains constrained by limited labeled data and the lack of systematic guidance on model selection, data scaling, and decoding strategies. Large pre-trained systems such as Whisper,…

Despite recent progress in multilingual speech processing, African languages remain under-represented in both research and deployed systems, particularly when it comes to strong, open-weight encoders that transfer well under low-resource…

Audio-based automatic speech recognition (ASR) degrades significantly in noisy environments and is particularly vulnerable to interfering speech, as the model cannot determine which speaker to transcribe. Audio-visual speech recognition…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has led to great strides in speech processing. However, the resources needed to train these models has become prohibitively large as they continue to scale. Currently, only a few groups with substantial…

Existing Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) models for speech typically process speech signals at a fixed resolution of 20 milliseconds. This approach overlooks the varying informational content present at different resolutions in speech…

ASR has achieved remarkable global progress, yet African low-resource languages remain rigorously underrepresented, producing barriers to digital inclusion across the continent with more than +2000 languages. This systematic literature…

This paper introduces Swivuriso, a 3000-hour multilingual speech dataset developed as part of the African Next Voices project, to support the development and benchmarking of automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies in seven South…

Recent years have witnessed significant advancements in self-supervised learning (SSL) methods for speech-processing tasks. Various speech-based SSL models have been developed and present promising performance on a range of downstream tasks…

We improve low-resource ASR by integrating the ideas of multilingual training and self-supervised learning. Concretely, we leverage an International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) multilingual model to create frame-level pseudo labels for…

In recent years, self-supervised pre-training methods have gained significant traction in learning high-level information from raw speech. Among these methods, HuBERT has demonstrated SOTA performance in automatic speech recognition (ASR).…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) is a long-standing goal for speech processing, since it utilizes large-scale unlabeled data and avoids extensive human labeling. Recent years witness great successes in applying self-supervised learning in…

In recent years, self-supervised learning (SSL) has achieved tremendous success in various speech tasks due to its power to extract representations from massive unlabeled data. However, compared with tasks such as speech recognition (ASR),…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) has been able to leverage unlabeled data to boost the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR) models when we have access to only a small amount of transcribed speech data. However, this raises the…

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,…

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…

Hidden-unit BERT (HuBERT) is a widely-used self-supervised learning (SSL) model in speech processing. However, we argue that its fixed 20ms resolution for hidden representations would not be optimal for various speech-processing tasks since…

Recent years have witnessed great strides in self-supervised learning (SSL) on the speech processing. The SSL model is normally pre-trained on a great variety of unlabelled data and a large model size is preferred to increase the modeling…

Self-supervised learning (SSL) models have achieved considerable improvements in automatic speech recognition (ASR). In addition, ASR performance could be further improved if the model is dedicated to audio content information learning…