When Can You Prune Your Network? A Study of Intermediate Neurons in Multilingual Speech Parsing

Minnie Kabra, Benjamin Lecouteux, Maximin Coavoux


Abstract
End-to-end speech parsing, a task recently proposed, consists in predicting both the transcription and the syntactic tree for a spoken utterance. Existing architectures for speech parsing often utilise intermediate neural networks. In this work, we examine the effectiveness of intermediate neural networks (NN) for parsing, and, specifically, what role do they play. We introduce a simpler end-to-end architecture for speech parsing, where we remove these intermediate NN units, reducing the parameters by 12%, while achieving comparable or better performance than prior method on both automatic speech recognition (ASR) and parsing. We demonstrate that intermediate NN units help reduce the representational gap when the pre-trained encoder is frozen. We do a comprehensive evaluation of speech parsing on French, and medium-low resource languages Slovenian and Naija. We further investigate the impact of the training data size and intermediate layers of the pretrained speech encoder on speech parsing.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.2132
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
45492–45506
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2132/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Minnie Kabra, Benjamin Lecouteux, and Maximin Coavoux. 2026. When Can You Prune Your Network? A Study of Intermediate Neurons in Multilingual Speech Parsing. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 45492–45506, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
When Can You Prune Your Network? A Study of Intermediate Neurons in Multilingual Speech Parsing (Kabra et al., Findings 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.2132.pdf