Accented Speech Recognition With Accent-specific Codebooks

Darshan Prabhu, Preethi Jyothi, Sriram Ganapathy, Vinit Unni


Abstract
Speech accents pose a significant challenge to state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems. Degradation in performance across underrepresented accents is a severe deterrent to the inclusive adoption of ASR. In this work, we propose a novel accent adaptation approach for end-to-end ASR systems using cross-attention with a trainable set of codebooks. These learnable codebooks capture accent-specific information and are integrated within the ASR encoder layers. The model is trained on accented English speech, while the test data also contained accents which were not seen during training. On the Mozilla Common Voice multi-accented dataset, we show that our proposed approach yields significant performance gains not only on the seen English accents (up to 37% relative improvement in word error rate) but also on the unseen accents (up to 5% relative improvement in WER). Further, we illustrate benefits for a zero-shot transfer setup on the L2Artic dataset. We also compare the performance with other approaches based on accent adversarial training.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.444
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
7175–7188
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.444
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.444
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Darshan Prabhu, Preethi Jyothi, Sriram Ganapathy, and Vinit Unni. 2023. Accented Speech Recognition With Accent-specific Codebooks. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 7175–7188, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Accented Speech Recognition With Accent-specific Codebooks (Prabhu et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.444.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.444.mp4