Unsupervised Cross-Lingual Representation Learning for Speech Recognition (original) (raw)
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XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale
Interspeech 2022
This paper presents XLS-R, a large-scale model for cross-lingual speech representation learning based on wav2vec 2.0. We train models with up to 2B parameters on nearly half a million hours of publicly available speech audio in 128 languages, an order of magnitude more public data than the largest known prior work. Our evaluation covers a wide range of tasks, domains, data regimes and languages, both high and low-resource. On the CoVoST-2 speech translation benchmark, we improve the previous state of the art by an average of 7.4 BLEU over 21 translation directions into English. For speech recognition, XLS-R improves over the best known prior work on BABEL, MLS, CommonVoice as well as VoxPopuli, lowering error rates by 14-34% relative on average. XLS-R also sets a new state of the art on VoxLin-gua107 language identification. Moreover, we show that with sufficient model size, cross-lingual pretraining can perform as well as English-only pretraining when translating English speech into other languages, a setting which favors monolingual pretraining. We hope XLS-R can help to improve speech processing tasks for many more languages of the world. Models and code are available at www.github.com/ pytorch/fairseq/tree/master/examples/wav2vec/xlsr. 1 * Equal contribution. † Work done while at Facebook AI. ‡ Equal advising.
An Exploration of Self-Supervised Pretrained Representations for End-to-End Speech Recognition
2021 IEEE Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding Workshop (ASRU), 2021
Self-supervised pretraining on speech data has achieved a lot of progress. High-fidelity representation of the speech signal is learned from a lot of untranscribed data and shows promising performance. Recently, there are several works focusing on evaluating the quality of self-supervised pretrained representations on various tasks without domain restriction, e.g. SUPERB. However, such evaluations do not provide a comprehensive comparison among many ASR benchmark corpora. In this paper, we focus on the general applications of pretrained speech representations, on advanced end-to-end automatic speech recognition (E2E-ASR) models. We select several pretrained speech representations and present the experimental results on various open-source and publicly available corpora for E2E-ASR. Without any modification of the back-end model architectures or training strategy, some of the experiments with pretrained representations, e.g., WSJ, WSJ0-2mix with HuBERT, reach or outperform current state-of-the-art (SOTA) recognition performance. Moreover, we further explore more scenarios for whether the pretraining representations are effective, such as the cross-language or overlapped speech. The scripts, configuratons and the trained models have been released in ESPnet to let the community reproduce our experiments and improve them.
XTREME-S: Evaluating Cross-lingual Speech Representations
Interspeech 2022
We introduce XTREME-S, a new benchmark to evaluate universal cross-lingual speech representations in many languages. XTREME-S covers four task families: speech recognition, classification, speech-to-text translation and retrieval. Covering 102 languages from 10+ language families, 3 different domains and 4 task families, XTREME-S aims to simplify multilingual speech representation evaluation, as well as catalyze research in "universal" speech representation learning. This paper describes the new benchmark and establishes the first speech-only and speechtext baselines using XLS-R and mSLAM on all downstream tasks. We motivate the design choices and detail how to use the benchmark. Datasets and fine-tuning scripts are made easily accessible through the HuggingFace platform. 1 2 https://sites.research.google/xtreme
Joint Unsupervised and Supervised Training for Multilingual ASR
ArXiv, 2021
Self-supervised training has shown promising gains in pretraining models and facilitating the downstream finetuning for speech recognition, like multilingual ASR. Most existing methods adopt a 2-stage scheme where the self-supervised loss is optimized in the first pretraining stage, and the standard supervised finetuning resumes in the second stage. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end (E2E) Joint Unsupervised and Supervised Training (JUST) method to combine the supervised RNN-T loss and the self-supervised contrastive and masked language modeling (MLM) losses. We validate its performance on the public dataset Multilingual LibriSpeech (MLS), which includes 8 languages and is extremely imbalanced. On MLS, we explore (1) JUST trained from scratch, and (2) JUST finetuned from a pretrained checkpoint. Experiments show that JUST can consistently outperform other existing state-of-the-art methods, and beat the monolingual baseline by a significant margin, demonstrating JUST’s capabilit...
ArXiv, 2022
Self-supervised learning (SSL) to learn high-level speech representations has been a popular approach to building Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems in low-resource settings. However, the common assumption made in literature is that a considerable amount of unlabeled data is available for the same domain or language that can be leveraged for SSL pretraining, which we acknowledge is not feasible in a real-world setting. In this paper, as part of the Interspeech Gram Vaani ASR challenge, we try to study the effect of domain, language, dataset size and other aspects of our upstream pre-training SSL data on the final performance low-resource downstream ASR task. We also build on the continued pre-training paradigm to study the effect of prior knowledge possessed by models trained using SSL. Extensive experiments and studies reveal that the performance of ASR systems is susceptible to the data used for SSL pre-training. Their performance improves with an increase in similarity and...
CLSRIL-23: Cross Lingual Speech Representations for Indic Languages
ArXiv, 2021
We present a CLSRIL-23, a self supervised learning based audio pre-trained model which learns cross lingual speech representations from raw audio across 23 Indic languages. It is built on top of wav2vec 2.0 which is solved by training a contrastive task over masked latent speech representations and jointly learns the quantization of latents shared across all languages. We compare the language wise loss during pretraining to compare effects of monolingual and multilingual pretraining. Performance on some downstream fine-tuning tasks for speech recognition is also compared and our experiments show that multilingual pretraining outperforms monolingual training, in terms of learning speech representations which encodes phonetic similarity of languages and also in terms of performance on down stream tasks. A decrease of 5% is observed in WER and 9.5% in CER when a multilingual pretrained model is used for finetuning in Hindi. All the code models are also open sourced. CLSRIL233 is a mode...
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), 2021
We introduce VoxPopuli, a large-scale multilingual corpus providing 400K hours of unlabeled speech data in 23 languages. It is the largest open data to date for unsupervised representation learning as well as semisupervised learning. VoxPopuli also contains 1.8K hours of transcribed speeches in 15 languages and their aligned oral interpretations into 15 target languages totaling 17.3K hours. We provide speech recognition (ASR) baselines and validate the versatility of VoxPopuli unlabeled data in semisupervised ASR and speech-to-text translation under challenging out-of-domain settings.
Self-Supervised Representations Improve End-to-End Speech Translation
Interspeech 2020, 2020
End-to-end speech-to-text translation can provide a simpler and smaller system but is facing the challenge of data scarcity. Pre-training methods can leverage unlabeled data and have been shown to be effective on data-scarce settings. In this work, we explore whether self-supervised pre-trained speech representations can benefit the speech translation task in both highand low-resource settings, whether they can transfer well to other languages, and whether they can be effectively combined with other common methods that help improve low-resource end-to-end speech translation such as using a pre-trained highresource speech recognition system. We demonstrate that selfsupervised pre-trained features can consistently improve the translation performance, and cross-lingual transfer allows to extend to a variety of languages without or with little tuning.
Towards universal speech recognition
Proceedings. Fourth IEEE International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, 2002
The increasing interest in multilingual applications like speech-to-speech translation systems is accompanied by the need for speech recognition front-ends in many languages that can also handle multiple input languages at the same time. In this paper we describe a universal speech recognition system that fulfills such needs. It is trained by sharing speech and text data across languages and thus reduces the number of parameters and overhead significantly at the cost of only slight accuracy loss. The final recognizer eases the burden of maintaining several monolingual engines, makes dedicated language identification obsolete and allows for code-switching within an utterance. To achieve these goals we developed new methods for constructing multilingual acoustic models and multilingual n-gram language models.