Jansen van Vüren, J.; Niesler, T. Improving N-Best Rescoring in Under-Resourced Code-Switched Speech Recognition Using Pretraining and Data Augmentation. Languages2022, 7, 236.
Jansen van Vüren, J.; Niesler, T. Improving N-Best Rescoring in Under-Resourced Code-Switched Speech Recognition Using Pretraining and Data Augmentation. Languages 2022, 7, 236.
Jansen van Vüren, J.; Niesler, T. Improving N-Best Rescoring in Under-Resourced Code-Switched Speech Recognition Using Pretraining and Data Augmentation. Languages2022, 7, 236.
Jansen van Vüren, J.; Niesler, T. Improving N-Best Rescoring in Under-Resourced Code-Switched Speech Recognition Using Pretraining and Data Augmentation. Languages 2022, 7, 236.
Abstract
We present improvements in n-best rescoring of code-switched speech achieved by n-gram augmentation as well as optimised pretraining of long short-term memory (LSTM) language models with larger corpora of out-of-domain monolingual text. In addition, we consider the application of large pretrained transformer-based architectures. Our experimental evaluation is performed on an under-resourced corpus of code-switched speech comprising four bilingual code-switched sub-corpora, each containing a Bantu language (isiZulu, isiXhosa, Sesotho, or Setswana) and English. We find in our experiments that, by combining n-gram augmentation with the optimised pretraining strategy, speech recognition errors are reduced for each individual bilingual pair by 3.51% absolute on average over the four corpora. Importantly, we find that even speech recognition at language boundaries improves by 1.14% even though the additional data is monolingual. Utilising the augmented n-grams for lattice generation, we then contrast these improvements with those achieved after fine-tuning pretrained transformer-based models such as distilled GPT-2 and M-BERT. We find that, even though these language models have not been trained on any of our target languages, they can improve speech recognition performance even in zero-shot settings. After fine-tuning on in-domain data, these large architectures offer further improvements, achieving a 4.45% absolute decrease in overall speech recognition errors and a 3.52% improvement over language boundaries. Finally, a combination of the optimised LSTM and fine-tuned BERT models achieves a further gain of 0.47% absolute on average for three of the four language pairs compared to M-BERT. We conclude that the careful optimisation of the pretraining strategy used for neural network language models can offer worthwhile improvements in speech recognition accuracy even at language switches, and that much larger state-of-the-art architectures such as GPT-2 and M-BERT promise even further gains.
Keywords
code-switching; automatic speech recognition; low resource languages; language modelling
Subject
Computer Science and Mathematics, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
Copyright:
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
