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Oral
Unsupervised Speech Recognition
Alexei Baevski · Wei-Ning Hsu · Alexis CONNEAU · Michael Auli

Wed Dec 08 08:00 AM -- 08:15 AM (PST) @
in Oral Session 3: Deep Learning »

Despite rapid progress in the recent past, current speech recognition systems still require labeled training data which limits this technology to a small fraction of the languages spoken around the globe. This paper describes wav2vec-U, short for wav2vec Unsupervised, a method to train speech recognition models without any labeled data. We leverage self-supervised speech representations to segment unlabeled audio and learn a mapping from these representations to phonemes via adversarial training. The right representations are key to the success of our method. Compared to the best previous unsupervised work, wav2vec-U reduces the phone error rate on the TIMIT benchmark from 26.1 to 11.3. On the larger English Librispeech benchmark, wav2vec-U achieves a word error rate of 5.9 on test-other, rivaling some of the best published systems trained on 960 hours of labeled data from only two years ago. We also experiment on nine other languages, including low-resource languages such as Kyrgyz, Swahili and Tatar.

Keywords: Deep Learning · Adversarial Robustness and Security · Self-Supervised Learning · Generative Model

Author Information

Alexei Baevski (Facebook AI Research)
Wei-Ning Hsu (Facebook, Inc.)
Alexis CONNEAU (Facebook)
Michael Auli (Facebook AI Research)

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