Cited by 162Speech Recognition and SynthesisSpeech and Audio ProcessingDomain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning

BigSSL: Exploring the Frontier of Large-Scale Semi-Supervised Learning for Automatic Speech Recognition

Open access
Zhang, Yu, Park, Daniel S., Han, Wei, Qin, James, Gulati, Anmol, Shor, Joel, Jansen, Aren, Xu, Yuanzhong +18 more·2022·IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing

Abstract

We summarize the results of a host of efforts using giant automatic speech recognition (ASR) models pre-trained using large, diverse unlabeled datasets containing approximately a million hours of audio. We find that the combination of pre-training, self-training and scaling up model size greatly increases data efficiency, even for extremely large tasks with tens of thousands of hours of labeled data. In particular, on an ASR task with 34 k hours of labeled data, by fine-tuning an 8 billion parameter pre-trained Conformer model we can match state-of-the-art (SoTA) performance with only 3% of the training data and significantly improve SoTA with the full training set. We also report on the universal benefits gained from using big pre-trained and self-trained models for a large set of downstream tasks that cover a wide range of speech domains and span multiple orders of magnitudes of dataset sizes, including obtaining SoTA performance on many public benchmarks. In addition, we utilize the learned representation of pre-trained networks to achieve SoTA results on non-ASR tasks.

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Crossref · 10.1109/jstsp.2022.3182537

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  • Some ASR tests produce error rates lower than manual transcription.

    “Some of these tests produce very low error rates that even outperform those achieved through manual transcription [Zhang et al. 2022].”

    From Measuring the Accuracy of Automatic Speech Recognition Solutions (2023) · cites this paper as Zhang et al. 2022

    Table III in “English (US) Voice Search” (p. 6) reports a 4.1% word error rate, supporting the claim that some ASR tests achieve low error rates. Neither that table nor the passages found by searching for manual transcription and human performance provide a human-transcription error rate, so the claimed comparison is unsupported. (LLM, conf=0.83)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

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Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

7 of the 114 references couldn’t be matched to a known paper.

Research works printed but not linked: 3

  1. [14][14] G. Zavaliagkos and T. Colthurst, 'Utilizing untranscribed training data to improve performance,' in DARPA Broadcast News Transcription and Understanding Workshop, Landsdowne , 1998, pp. 301-305. -
  2. [57][57] A. Radford, J. Wu, R. Child, D. Luan, D. Amodei, I. Sutskever et al. , 'Language models are unsupervised multitask learners,' OpenAI blog , vol. 1, no. 8, p. 9, 2019. -
  3. [60][60] S. Rajbhandari, J. Rasley, O. Ruwase, and Y. He, 'Zero: Memory optimizations toward training trillion parameter models,' in SC20: International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis . IEEE, 2020, pp. 1-16. -

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Authors
Zhang, Y., Park, D. S., Han, W., Qin, J., Gulati, A., Shor, J., Jansen, A., Xu, Y., Huang, Y., Wang, S., Zhou, Z., Li, B., Ma, M., Chan, W., Yu, J., Wang, Y., Cao, L., Sim, K. C., Ramabhadran, B., Sainath, T. N., Beaufays, F., Chen, Z., Le, Q. V., Chiu, C.-C., Pang, R., & Wu, Y.
Affiliations
  • Google (United States) (US)
  • Google, Inc., USA
Venue
IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing
Published
2022-10
Volume
16
Issue
6
Pages
1519-1532
ISSN
  • 1932-4553 (ISSN-L)
  • 1941-0484
OpenAlex
W3204696009
Cited by
161
References
114
Citations by year
2026: 11 · 2025: 28 · 2024: 40 · 2023: 51 · 2022: 28 · 2021: 3
FWCI
12.09
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Speech Recognition and Synthesis
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Signal Processing › Speech and Audio Processing
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Domain Adaptation and Few-Shot Learning
Keywords
speech recognition, pre-training, self-training, data efficiency, conformational isomers, model scaling, transfer learning, representation learning

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