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. Although it enlarges the scope of its application, the capacity of the pre-trained model is not fully utilized for the ASR task, and the learned representations may not be optimal for ASR. In this work, in order to build a better pre-trained model for low-resource ASR, we propose a pre-training approach called wav2vec-S, where we use task-specific semi-supervised pre-training to refine the self-supervised pre-trained model for the ASR task thus more effectively utilize the capacity of the pre-trained model to generate task-specific representations for ASR. Experiments show that compared to wav2vec 2.0, wav2vec-S only requires a marginal increment of pre-training time but could significantly improve ASR performance on in-domain, cross-domain and cross-lingual datasets. Average relative WER reductions are 24.5% and 6.6% for 1h and 10h fine-tuning, respectively. Furthermore, we show that semi-supervised pre-training could close the representation gap between the self-supervised pre-trained model and the corresponding fine-tuned model through canonical correlation analysis.
Investigating self-supervised, weakly supervised and fully supervised training approaches for multi-domain automatic speech recognition: a study on Bangladeshi Bangla
Shahjalal University of Science and Technology（沙贾拉尔科技大学）；University of Malta（马耳他大学）；Leading University（领先大学）
African Masters of Machine Intelligence（非洲机器学习硕士项目）；Naver Labs, Europe（欧洲 Naver 实验室）
This paper describes the results of an informal collaboration launched during the African Master of Machine Intelligence (AMMI) in June 2020. After a series of lectures and labs on speech data collection using mobile applications and on self-supervised representation learning from speech, a small group of students and the lecturer continued working on automatic speech recognition (ASR) project for three languages: Wolof, Ga, and Somali. This paper describes how data was collected and ASR systems developed with a small amount (1h) of transcribed speech as training data. In these low resource co…
Training state-of-the-art Automated Speech Recognition (ASR) models typically requires a substantial amount of transcribed speech. In this work, we demonstrate that a modality-matched joint speech and text model can be leveraged to train a massively multilingual ASR model without any supervised (manually transcribed) speech for some languages. This paper explores the use of jointly learnt speech and text representations in a massively multilingual, zero supervised speech, real-world setting to expand the set of languages covered by ASR with only unlabeled speech and text in the target language…
High-quality data labeling from specific domains is costly and human time-consuming. In this work, we propose a self-supervised domain adaptation method, based upon an iterative pseudo-forced alignment algorithm. The produced alignments are employed to customize an end-to-end Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and iteratively refined. The algorithm is fed with frame-wise character posteriors produced by a seed ASR, trained with out-of-domain data, and optimized throughout a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) loss. The alignments are computed iteratively upon a corpus of broadcast TV. …
While deep learning based end-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have greatly simplified modeling pipelines, they suffer from the data sparsity issue. In this work, we propose a self-training method with an end-to-end system for semi-supervised ASR. Starting from a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) system trained on the supervised data, we iteratively generate pseudo-labels on a mini-batch of unsupervised utterances with the current model, and use the pseudo-labels to augment the supervised data for immediate model update. Our method retains the simplicity of end-to-en…
Recent advances in supervised, semi-supervised and self-supervised deep learning algorithms have shown significant improvement in the performance of automatic speech recognition(ASR) systems. The state-of-the-art systems have achieved a word error rate (WER) less than 5%. However, in the past, researchers have argued the non-suitability of the WER metric for the evaluation of ASR systems for downstream tasks such as spoken language understanding (SLU) and information retrieval. The reason is that the WER works at the surface level and does not include any syntactic and semantic knowledge.The c…
Nara Institute of Science and Technology（奈良先端科学技术大学院大学）；Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology（日本北陆先端科学技术大学院大学）
Consistency regularization has recently been applied to semi-supervised sequence-to-sequence (S2S) automatic speech recognition (ASR). This principle encourages an ASR model to output similar predictions for the same input speech with different perturbations. The existing paradigm of semi-supervised S2S ASR utilizes SpecAugment as data augmentation and requires a static teacher model to produce pseudo transcripts for untranscribed speech. However, this paradigm fails to take full advantage of consistency regularization. First, the masking operations of SpecAugment may damage the linguistic con…
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 question of which subset of the available unlabeled data should be selected for transcription. Our work investigates different unsupervised data selection techniques for fine-tuning the HuBERT model under a limited transcription budget. We investigate the impact of speaker diversity, gender bias, and topic diversity on the downstream ASR performance. We also d…
Building Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems from scratch is significantly challenging, mostly due to the time-consuming and financially-expensive process of annotating a large amount of audio data with transcripts. Although several unsupervised pre-training models have been proposed, applying such models directly might still be sub-optimal if more labeled, training data could be obtained without a large cost. In this paper, we present a weakly supervised framework for constructing ASR systems with massive video data. As videos often contain human-speech audios aligned with subtitles, w…
Many semi- and weakly-supervised approaches have been investigated for overcoming the labeling cost of building high quality speech recognition systems. On the challenging task of transcribing social media videos in low-resource conditions, we conduct a large scale systematic comparison between two self-labeling methods on one hand, and weakly-supervised pretraining using contextual metadata on the other. We investigate distillation methods at the frame level and the sequence level for hybrid, encoder-only CTC-based, and encoder-decoder speech recognition systems on Dutch and Romanian language…
Self-supervised ASR-TTS models suffer in out-of-domain data conditions. Here we propose an enhanced ASR-TTS (EAT) model that incorporates two main features: 1) The ASR$\rightarrow$TTS direction is equipped with a language model reward to penalize the ASR hypotheses before forwarding it to TTS. 2) In the TTS$\rightarrow$ASR direction, a hyper-parameter is introduced to scale the attention context from synthesized speech before sending it to ASR to handle out-of-domain data. Training strategies and the effectiveness of the EAT model are explored under out-of-domain data conditions. The results s…
Self- and semi-supervised learning methods have been actively investigated to reduce labeled training data or enhance the model performance. However, the approach mostly focus on in-domain performance for public datasets. In this study, we utilize the combination of self- and semi-supervised learning methods to solve unseen domain adaptation problem in a large-scale production setting for online ASR model. This approach demonstrates that using the source domain data with a small fraction of the target domain data (3%) can recover the performance gap compared to a full data baseline: relative 1…
While the Turkish language is listed among low-resource languages, literature on Turkish automatic speech recognition (ASR) is relatively old. In this report, we present our findings on Turkish ASR with speech representation learning using HUBERT. We investigate pre-training HUBERT for Turkish with large-scale data curated from online resources. We pre-train our model using 6,500 hours of speech data from YouTube. The results show that the models are not ready for commercial use since they are not robust against disturbances that typically occur in real-world settings such as variations in acc…
We study pseudo-labeling for the semi-supervised training of ResNet, Time-Depth Separable ConvNets, and Transformers for speech recognition, with either CTC or Seq2Seq loss functions. We perform experiments on the standard LibriSpeech dataset, and leverage additional unlabeled data from LibriVox through pseudo-labeling. We show that while Transformer-based acoustic models have superior performance with the supervised dataset alone, semi-supervision improves all models across architectures and loss functions and bridges much of the performance gaps between them. In doing so, we reach a new stat…
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 o…
Brno University of Technology（布尔诺理工大学）；IBM T. J. Watson Research Center（IBM托马斯·J·沃森研究中心）；Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学）；MERL（三菱电机研究实验室）
Sequence-to-sequence automatic speech recognition (ASR) models require large quantities of data to attain high performance. For this reason, there has been a recent surge in interest for unsupervised and semi-supervised training in such models. This work builds upon recent results showing notable improvements in semi-supervised training using cycle-consistency and related techniques. Such techniques derive training procedures and losses able to leverage unpaired speech and/or text data by combining ASR with Text-to-Speech (TTS) models. In particular, this work proposes a new semi-supervised lo…
Stellenbosch University（斯泰伦博斯大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
This paper presents recent progress in the acoustic modelling of under-resourced code-switched (CS) speech in multiple South African languages. We consider two approaches. The first constructs separate bilingual acoustic models corresponding to language pairs (English-isiZulu, English-isiXhosa, English-Setswana and English-Sesotho). The second constructs a single unified five-lingual acoustic model representing all the languages (English, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Setswana and Sesotho). For these two approaches we consider the effectiveness of semi-supervised training to increase the size of the very…
Self-supervised learning (SSL) models reshaped our approach to speech, language and vision. However their huge size and the opaque relations between their layers and tasks result in slow inference and network overthinking, where predictions made from the last layer of large models is worse than those made from intermediate layers. Early exit (EE) strategies can solve both issues by dynamically reducing computations at inference time for certain samples. Although popular for classification tasks in vision and language, EE has seen less use for sequence-to-sequence speech recognition (ASR) tasks…
In this paper, we investigate the semi-supervised joint training of text to speech (TTS) and automatic speech recognition (ASR), where a small amount of paired data and a large amount of unpaired text data are available. Conventional studies form a cycle called the TTS-ASR pipeline, where the multispeaker TTS model synthesizes speech from text with a reference speech and the ASR model reconstructs the text from the synthesized speech, after which both models are trained with a cycle-consistency loss. However, the synthesized speech does not reflect the speaker characteristics of the reference …
Supervised ASR models have reached unprecedented levels of accuracy, thanks in part to ever-increasing amounts of labelled training data. However, in many applications and locales, only moderate amounts of data are available, which has led to a surge in semi- and weakly-supervised learning research. In this paper, we conduct a large-scale study evaluating the effectiveness of weakly-supervised learning for speech recognition by using loosely related contextual information as a surrogate for ground-truth labels. For weakly supervised training, we use 50k hours of public English social media vid…
Stellenbosch University（斯泰伦博斯大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
This paper reports on the semi-supervised development of acoustic and language models for under-resourced, code-switched speech in five South African languages. Two approaches are considered. The first constructs four separate bilingual automatic speech recognisers (ASRs) corresponding to four different language pairs between which speakers switch frequently. The second uses a single, unified, five-lingual ASR system that represents all the languages (English, isiZulu, isiXhosa, Setswana and Sesotho). We evaluate the effectiveness of these two approaches when used to add additional data to our…
Self-supervised learning (SSL) models confront challenges of abrupt informational collapse or slow dimensional collapse. We propose TriNet, which introduces a novel triple-branch architecture for preventing collapse and stabilizing the pre-training. TriNet learns the SSL latent embedding space and incorporates it to a higher level space for predicting pseudo target vectors generated by a frozen teacher. Our experimental results show that the proposed method notably stabilizes and accelerates pre-training and achieves a relative word error rate reduction (WERR) of 6.06% compared to the state-of…
Collecting sufficient labeled data for spoken language understanding (SLU) is expensive and time-consuming. Recent studies achieved promising results by using pre-trained models in low-resource scenarios. Inspired by this, we aim to ask: which (if any) pre-training strategies can improve performance across SLU benchmarks? To answer this question, we employ four types of pre-trained models and their combinations for SLU. We leverage self-supervised speech and language models (LM) pre-trained on large quantities of unpaired data to extract strong speech and text representations. We also explore …
Recently self-supervised learning has emerged as an effective approach to improve the performance of automatic speech recognition (ASR). Under such a framework, the neural network is usually pre-trained with massive unlabeled data and then fine-tuned with limited labeled data. However, the non-streaming architecture like bidirectional transformer is usually adopted by the neural network to achieve competitive results, which can not be used in streaming scenarios. In this paper, we mainly focus on improving the performance of streaming transformer under the self-supervised learning framework. S…
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)（三菱电机研究实验室（MERL））
Semi-supervised learning has demonstrated promising results in automatic speech recognition (ASR) by self-training using a seed ASR model with pseudo-labels generated for unlabeled data. The effectiveness of this approach largely relies on the pseudo-label accuracy, for which typically only the 1-best ASR hypothesis is used. However, alternative ASR hypotheses of an N-best list can provide more accurate labels for an unlabeled speech utterance and also reflect uncertainties of the seed ASR model. In this paper, we propose a generalized form of the connectionist temporal classification (CTC) ob…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Yahoo Japan Corporation（雅虎日本公司）
This work presents our end-to-end (E2E) automatic speech recognition (ASR) model targetting at robust speech recognition, called Integraded speech Recognition with enhanced speech Input for Self-supervised learning representation (IRIS). Compared with conventional E2E ASR models, the proposed E2E model integrates two important modules including a speech enhancement (SE) module and a self-supervised learning representation (SSLR) module. The SE module enhances the noisy speech. Then the SSLR module extracts features from enhanced speech to be used for speech recognition (ASR). To train the prop…
Stellenbosch University（斯泰伦博斯大学）；National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
This paper considers the impact of automatic segmentation on the fully-automatic, semi-supervised training of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for five-lingual code-switched (CS) speech. Four automatic segmentation techniques were evaluated in terms of the recognition performance of an ASR system trained on the resulting segments in a semi-supervised manner. The system's output was compared with the recognition rates achieved by a semi-supervised system trained on manually assigned segments. Three of the automatic techniques use a newly proposed convolutional neural network (CNN) mod…
Munsit at NADI 2025 Shared Task 2: Pushing the Boundaries of Multidialectal Arabic ASR with Weakly Supervised Pretraining and Continual Supervised Fine-tuning
Self-supervised learning via masked prediction pre-training (MPPT) has shown impressive performance on a range of speech-processing tasks. This paper proposes a method to bias self-supervised learning towards a specific task. The core idea is to slightly finetune the model that is used to obtain the target sequence. This leads to better performance and a substantial increase in training speed. Furthermore, this paper proposes a variant of MPPT that allows low-footprint streaming models to be trained effectively by computing the MPPT loss on masked and unmasked frames. These approaches are eval…
Tencent Cloud Xiaowei（腾讯云小微）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Recently, self-supervised pre-training has gained success in automatic speech recognition (ASR). However, considering the difference between speech accents in real scenarios, how to identify accents and use accent features to improve ASR is still challenging. In this paper, we employ the self-supervised pre-training method for both accent identification and accented speech recognition tasks. For the former task, a standard deviation constraint loss (SDC-loss) based end-to-end (E2E) architecture is proposed to identify accents under the same language. As for accented speech recognition task, we…
Indian Institute of Technology Madras（印度理工学院马德拉斯分校）
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has shown tremendous success in various speech-related downstream tasks, including Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). The output embeddings of the SSL model are treated as powerful short-time representations of the speech signal. However, in the ASR task, the main objective is to get the correct sequence of acoustic units, characters, or byte-pair encodings (BPEs). Usually, encoder-decoder architecture works exceptionally well for a sequence-to-sequence task like ASR. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new paradigm that exploits the power of a decoder during…
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has shown promise in learning representations of audio that are useful for automatic speech recognition (ASR). But, training SSL models like wav2vec~2.0 requires a two-stage pipeline. In this paper we demonstrate a single-stage training of ASR models that can utilize both unlabeled and labeled data. During training, we alternately minimize two losses: an unsupervised masked Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC) loss and the supervised audio-to-text alignment loss Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC). We show that this joint training method directly optimizes…
Institute of Acoustics, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院声学研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has shown rapid advances in recent years but still degrades significantly in far-field and noisy environments. The recent development of self-supervised learning (SSL) technology can improve the ASR performance by pre-training the model with additional unlabeled speech and the SSL pre-trained model has achieved the state-of-the-art result on several speech benchmarks. Nevertheless, most of the previous SSL methods ignore the influence of the background noise or reverberation, which is crucial to deploying ASR systems in real-world speech applications. This st…
Self-supervised models for speech processing emerged recently as popular foundation blocks in speech processing pipelines. These models are pre-trained on unlabeled audio data and then used in speech processing downstream tasks such as automatic speech recognition (ASR) or speech translation (ST). Since these models are now used in research and industrial systems alike, it becomes necessary to understand the impact caused by some features such as gender distribution within pre-training data. Using French as our investigation language, we train and compare gender-specific wav2vec 2.0 models aga…
Self-supervised learning (SSL) in the pretraining stage using un-annotated speech data has been successful in low-resource automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks. However, models trained through SSL are biased to the pretraining data which is usually different from the data used in finetuning tasks, causing a domain shifting problem, and thus resulting in limited knowledge transfer. We propose a novel framework, domain responsible adaptation and finetuning (DRAFT), to reduce domain shifting in pretrained speech models through an additional adaptation stage. In DRAFT, residual adapters (RAs) …
Spoken language understanding (SLU) is an essential task for machines to understand human speech for better interactions. However, errors from the automatic speech recognizer (ASR) usually hurt the understanding performance. In reality, ASR systems may not be easy to adjust for the target scenarios. Therefore, this paper focuses on learning utterance representations that are robust to ASR errors using a contrastive objective, and further strengthens the generalization ability by combining supervised contrastive learning and self-distillation in model fine-tuning. Experiments on three benchmark…
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；University of Florida（佛罗里达大学）
A targeted adversarial attack produces audio samples that can force an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system to output attacker-chosen text. To exploit ASR models in real-world, black-box settings, an adversary can leverage the transferability property, i.e. that an adversarial sample produced for a proxy ASR can also fool a different remote ASR. However recent work has shown that transferability against large ASR models is very difficult. In this work, we show that modern ASR architectures, specifically ones based on Self-Supervised Learning, are in fact vulnerable to transferability. We …
Pseudo-labeling is the most adopted method for pre-training automatic speech recognition (ASR) models. However, its performance suffers from the supervised teacher model's degrading quality in low-resource setups and under domain transfer. Inspired by the successes of contrastive representation learning for computer vision and speech applications, and more recently for supervised learning of visual objects, we propose Contrastive Semi-supervised Learning (CSL). CSL eschews directly predicting teacher-generated pseudo-labels in favor of utilizing them to select positive and negative examples. I…
There is growing interest in unifying the streaming and full-context automatic speech recognition (ASR) networks into a single end-to-end ASR model to simplify the model training and deployment for both use cases. While in real-world ASR applications, the streaming ASR models typically operate under more storage and computational constraints - e.g., on embedded devices - than any server-side full-context models. Motivated by the recent progress in Omni-sparsity supernet training, where multiple subnetworks are jointly optimized in one single model, this work aims to jointly learn a compact spa…
