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Title: How Phonotactics Affect Multilingual and Zero-Shot ASR Performance
The idea of combining multiple languages’ recordings to train a single automatic speech recognition (ASR) model brings the promise of the emergence of universal speech representation. Recently, a Transformer encoder-decoder model has been shown to leverage multilingual data well in IPA transcriptions of languages presented during training. However, the representations it learned were not successful in zero-shot transfer to unseen languages. Because that model lacks an explicit factorization of the acoustic model (AM) and language model (LM), it is unclear to what degree the performance suffered from differences in pronunciation or the mismatch in phonotactics. To gain more insight into the factors limiting zero-shot ASR transfer, we replace the encoder-decoder with a hybrid ASR system consisting of a separate AM and LM. Then, we perform an extensive evaluation of monolingual, multilingual, and crosslingual (zero-shot) acoustic and language models on a set of 13 phonetically diverse languages. We show that the gain from modeling crosslingual phonotactics is limited, and imposing a too strong model can hurt the zero-shot transfer. Furthermore, we find that a multilingual LM hurts a multilingual ASR system’s performance, and retaining only the target language’s phonotactic data in LM training is preferable.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1910319
NSF-PAR ID:
10273604
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
ICASSP
Page Range / eLocation ID:
7238 to 7242
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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