Transfer Learning Performance of Self-Supervised Speech Models Pre-Trained on Flemish Dutch for Cross-Lingual ASR Tasks

Abstract

Abstract: Recent research in speech processing exhibits a growing interest in unsupervised and self-supervised representation learning from unlabelled data to alleviate the need for large amounts of annotated data. We investigate several popular pre-training methods and apply them to Flemish Dutch. We compare off-the-shelf English pre-trained models to models trained on an increasing amount of Flemish data. We find that the most important factors for positive transfer to downstream speech recognition tasks include a substantial amount of data and a matching pre-training domain. Ideally, we also finetune

Research Question

How does the transfer learning performance of self-supervised speech models pre-trained on Flemish Dutch compare to models pre-trained on other low-resource Germanic languages when fine-tuned for cross-lingual ASR tasks, as measured by WER on Common Voice benchmarks?

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