Fast Development of ASR in African Languages using Self Supervised Speech Representation Learning

03/16/2021

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by   Jama Hussein Mohamud, et al.

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This paper describes the results of an informal collaboration launched during the African Master of Machine Intelligence (AMMI) in June 2020. After a series of lectures and labs on speech data collection using mobile applications and on self-supervised representation learning from speech, a small group of students and the lecturer continued working on automatic speech recognition (ASR) project for three languages: Wolof, Ga, and Somali. This paper describes how data was collected and ASR systems developed with a small amount (1h) of transcribed speech as training data. In these low resource conditions, pre-training a model on large amounts of raw speech was fundamental for the efficiency of ASR systems developed.