Towards Robust Speech Representation Learning for Thousands of Languages
William Chen, Wangyou Zhang, Yifan Peng, Xinjian Li, Jinchuan Tian, Jiatong Shi, Xuankai Chang, Soumi Maiti, Karen Livescu, Shinji Watanabe
Abstract
Self-supervised learning (SSL) has helped extend speech technologies to more languages by reducing the need for labeled data. However, models are still far from supporting the world’s 7000+ languages. We propose XEUS, a Cross-lingual Encoder for Universal Speech, trained on over 1 million hours of data across 4057 languages, extending the language coverage of SSL models 4-fold. We combine 1 million hours of speech from existing publicly accessible corpora with a newly created corpus of 7400+ hours from 4057 languages, which will be publicly released. To handle the diverse conditions of multilingual speech data, we augment the typical SSL masked prediction approach with a novel dereverberation objective, increasing robustness. We evaluate XEUS on several benchmarks, and show that it consistently outperforms or achieves comparable results to state-of-the-art (SOTA) SSL models across a variety of tasks. XEUS sets a new SOTA on the ML-SUPERB benchmark: it outperforms MMS 1B and w2v-BERT 2.0 v2 by 0.8% and 4.4% respectively, despite having less parameters or pre-training data. Checkpoints, code, and data are found in https://www.wavlab.org/activities/2024/xeus/.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.emnlp-main.570
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- November
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Miami, Florida, USA
- Editors:
- Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 10205–10224
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/icon-24-ingestion/2024.emnlp-main.570/
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.570
- Cite (ACL):
- William Chen, Wangyou Zhang, Yifan Peng, Xinjian Li, Jinchuan Tian, Jiatong Shi, Xuankai Chang, Soumi Maiti, Karen Livescu, and Shinji Watanabe. 2024. Towards Robust Speech Representation Learning for Thousands of Languages. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10205–10224, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Towards Robust Speech Representation Learning for Thousands of Languages (Chen et al., EMNLP 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/icon-24-ingestion/2024.emnlp-main.570.pdf