Towards End-to-End Unsupervised Speech Recognition
Alexander H. Liu, Wei-Ning Hsu, Michael Auli, Alexei Baevski · 2022 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT) · 2023
Unsupervised speech recognition has shown great potential to make Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems accessible to every language. However, existing methods still heavily rely on hand-crafted pre-processing. Similar to the trend of making supervised speech recognition end-to-end, we introduce wav2vec-U 2.0 which does away with all audio-side pre-processing and improves accuracy through better architecture. In addition, we introduce an auxiliary self-supervised objective that ties model predictions back to the input. Experiments show that wav2vec-U 2.0 improves unsupervised recognition results across different languages while being conceptually simpler.