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Title: That Sounds Familiar: An Analysis of Phonetic Representations Transfer Across Languages
Only a handful of the world’s languages are abundant with the resources that enable practical applications of speech processing technologies. One of the methods to overcome this problem is to use the resources existing in other languages to train a mul-tilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) model, which, intuitively, should learn some universal phonetic representations.In this work, we focus on gaining a deeper understanding ofhow general these representations might be, and how individual phones are getting improved in a multilingual setting. To that end, we select a phonetically diverse set of languages, and perform a series of monolingual, multilingual and crosslingual (zero-shot) experiments. The ASR is trained to recognize the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) token sequences. We ob-serve significant improvements across all languages in the multilingual setting, and stark degradation in the crosslingual setting, where the model, among other errors, considers Javanese as a tone language. Notably, as little as 10 hours of the target language training data tremendously reduces ASR error rates.Our analysis uncovered that even the phones that are unique to a single language can benefit greatly from adding training data from other languages - an encouraging result for the low-resource speech community  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1910319
NSF-PAR ID:
10273581
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Interspeech
Page Range / eLocation ID:
3705 to 3709
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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