AfriHuBERT: A self-supervised speech representation model for African languages

Autor:	Alabi, Jesujoba O., Liu, Xuechen, Klakow, Dietrich, Yamagishi, Junichi
Rok vydání:	2024
Předmět:	Computer Science - Computation and Language Computer Science - Sound Electrical Engineering and Systems Science - Audio and Speech Processing
Druh dokumentu:	Working Paper
Popis:	In this work, we present AfriHuBERT, an extension of mHuBERT-147, a state-of-the-art (SOTA) and compact self-supervised learning (SSL) model, originally pretrained on 147 languages. While mHuBERT-147 was pretrained on 16 African languages, we expand this to cover 39 African languages through continued pretraining on 6,500+ hours of speech data aggregated from diverse sources, including 23 newly added languages. We evaluate AfriHuBERT on two key speech tasks: Language Identification (LID) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) using FLEURS dataset. Our results show a +4% F1 score improvement on average for LID and a -1.2% average Word Error Rate (WER) reduction for ASR. Further analysis shows that ASR models trained on AfriHuBERT exhibit improved cross-corpus generalization. Additionally, the analysis indicates that the FLEURS have data quality limitations that may affect their suitability for evaluating low-resource African languages, suggesting the need for better evaluation benchmarks for these languages. Comment: 14 pages
Databáze:	arXiv
Externí odkaz:	http://arxiv.org/abs/2409.20201 Zobrazit plný text záznamu View this record from Arxiv