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arXiv · 2407.17852

Scaling A Simple Approach to Zero-Shot Speech Recognition

Jinming Zhao·Vineel Pratap·Michael Auli
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Abstract

Despite rapid progress in increasing the language coverage of automatic speech recognition, the field is still far from covering all languages with a known writing script. Recent work showed promising results with a zero-shot approach requiring only a small amount of text data, however, accuracy heavily depends on the quality of the used phonemizer which is often weak for unseen languages. In this paper, we present MMS Zero-shot a conceptually simpler approach based on romanization and an acoustic model trained on data in 1,078 different languages or three orders of magnitude more than prior art. MMS Zero-shot reduces the average character error rate by a relative 46% over 100 unseen languages compared to the best previous work. Moreover, the error rate of our approach is only 2.5x higher compared to in-domain supervised baselines, while our approach uses no labeled data for the evaluation languages at all.

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Jinming Zhao, Vineel Pratap, Michael Auli. 2024-07-25. Scaling A Simple Approach to Zero-Shot Speech Recognition. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.17852

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