XLSR-Wav2Vec2

Overview

The XLSR-Wav2Vec2 model was proposed in Unsupervised Cross-Lingual Representation Learning For Speech Recognition by Alexis Conneau, Alexei Baevski, Ronan Collobert, Abdelrahman Mohamed, Michael Auli.

The abstract from the paper is the following:

This paper presents XLSR which learns cross-lingual speech representations by pretraining a single model from the raw waveform of speech in multiple languages. We build on wav2vec 2.0 which is trained by solving a contrastive task over masked latent speech representations and jointly learns a quantization of the latents shared across languages. The resulting model is fine-tuned on labeled data and experiments show that cross-lingual pretraining significantly outperforms monolingual pretraining. On the CommonVoice benchmark, XLSR shows a relative phoneme error rate reduction of 72% compared to the best known results. On BABEL, our approach improves word error rate by 16% relative compared to a comparable system. Our approach enables a single multilingual speech recognition model which is competitive to strong individual models. Analysis shows that the latent discrete speech representations are shared across languages with increased sharing for related languages. We hope to catalyze research in low-resource speech understanding by releasing XLSR-53, a large model pretrained in 53 languages.

The original code can be found here.

Note: Meta (FAIR) released a new version of Wav2Vec2-BERT 2.0 - it’s pretrained on 4.5M hours of audio. We especially recommend using it for fine-tuning tasks, e.g. as per this guide.

Usage tips

• XLSR-Wav2Vec2 is a speech model that accepts a float array corresponding to the raw waveform of the speech signal.
• XLSR-Wav2Vec2 model was trained using connectionist temporal classification (CTC) so the model output has to be decoded using Wav2Vec2CTCTokenizer.