Cited by 637Speech Recognition and SynthesisSpeech and Audio ProcessingMusic and Audio Processing

Unsupervised Cross-Lingual Representation Learning for Speech Recognition

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Conneau, Alexis, Baevski, Alexei, Collobert, Ronan, Mohamed, Abdelrahman, Auli, Michael·2021·Interspeech 2021

Abstract

This paper presents XLSR which learns cross-lingual speech representations by pretraining a single model from the raw waveform of speech in multiple languages. We build on wav2vec 2.0 which is trained by solving a contrastive task over masked latent speech representations and jointly learns a quantization of the latents shared across languages. The resulting model is fine-tuned on labeled data and experiments show that cross-lingual pretraining significantly outperforms monolingual pretraining. On the CommonVoice benchmark, XLSR shows a relative phoneme error rate reduction of 72% compared to the best known results. On BABEL, our approach improves word error rate by 16% relative compared to a comparable system. Our approach enables a single multilingual speech recognition model which is competitive to strong individual models. Analysis shows that the latent discrete speech representations are shared across languages with increased sharing for related languages. We hope to catalyze research in low-resource speech understanding by releasing XLSR-53, a large model pretrained in 53 languages.

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Research works printed but not linked: 2

  1. Mark JF Gales, Kate M Knill, and Anton Ragni. Low-resource speech recognition and keyword- spotting. In Proc. of SPECOM, pp. 3-19. Springer, 2017.
  2. Yonglong Tian, Dilip Krishnan, and Phillip Isola. Contrastive multiview coding. arXiv, 2019.

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Authors
Conneau, A., Baevski, A., Collobert, R., Mohamed, A., & Auli, M.
Affiliations
Meta (United Kingdom) (GB)
Venue
Interspeech 2021
Publisher
ISCA
Published
2021-08-30
Pages
2426-2430
ISSN
2308-457X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W3037057938
Cited by
637
References
47
Citations by year
2026: 60 · 2025: 136 · 2024: 115 · 2023: 155 · 2022: 103 · 2021: 61 · 2020: 7
FWCI
50.12
Type
conference paper
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Interspeech (USB) (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 › Signal Processing › Music and Audio Processing
Keywords
cross-lingual representation learning, multilingual speech recognition, XLS-R, wav2vec 2.0, contrastive learning, shared latent representation, Common Voice, Babel

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