Amruta Parulekar


2024

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Parameter-efficient Adaptation of Multilingual Multimodal Models for Low-resource ASR
Abhishek Gupta | Amruta Parulekar | Sameep Chattopadhyay | Preethi Jyothi
Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Multilingual Representation Learning (MRL 2024)

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) for low-resource languages remains a challenge due to the scarcity of labeled training data. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning and text-only adaptation are two popular methods that have been used to address such low-resource settings. In this work, we investigate how these techniques can be effectively combined using a multilingual multimodal model like SeamlessM4T. Multimodal models are able to leverage unlabeled text via text-only adaptation with further parameter-efficient ASR fine-tuning, thus boosting ASR performance. We also show cross-lingual transfer from a high-resource language, achieving up to a relative 17% WER reduction over baseline in an extremely low-resource setting without any labeled speech.