Performance Analysis of Speech Encoders for Low-Resource SLU and ASR in Tunisian Dialect

Salima Mdhaffar, Haroun Elleuch, Fethi Bougares, Yannick Estève


Abstract
Speech encoders pretrained through self-supervised learning (SSL) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various downstream tasks, including Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). For instance, fine-tuning SSL models for such tasks has shown significant potential, leading to improvements in the SOTA performance across challenging datasets.In contrast to existing research, this paper contributes by comparing the effectiveness of SSL approaches in the context of (i) the low-resource Spoken Tunisian Arabic Dialect and (ii) its combination with a low-resource SLU and ASR scenario, where only a few semantic annotations are available for fine-tuning. We conducted experiments using many SSL speech encoders on the TARIC-SLU dataset. We used speech encoders that were pre-trained on either monolingual or multilingual speech data. Some of them have also been refined without in-domain nor Tunisian data through a multimodal supervised teacher-student learning. The study made in this paper yields numerous significant findings that we will discuss in the paper.
Anthology ID:
2024.arabicnlp-1.12
Volume:
Proceedings of The Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Nizar Habash, Houda Bouamor, Ramy Eskander, Nadi Tomeh, Ibrahim Abu Farha, Ahmed Abdelali, Samia Touileb, Injy Hamed, Yaser Onaizan, Bashar Alhafni, Wissam Antoun, Salam Khalifa, Hatem Haddad, Imed Zitouni, Badr AlKhamissi, Rawan Almatham, Khalil Mrini
Venues:
ArabicNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
130–139
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.arabicnlp-1.12
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Salima Mdhaffar, Haroun Elleuch, Fethi Bougares, and Yannick Estève. 2024. Performance Analysis of Speech Encoders for Low-Resource SLU and ASR in Tunisian Dialect. In Proceedings of The Second Arabic Natural Language Processing Conference, pages 130–139, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Performance Analysis of Speech Encoders for Low-Resource SLU and ASR in Tunisian Dialect (Mdhaffar et al., ArabicNLP-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.arabicnlp-1.12.pdf