Improving Luxembourgish Speech Recognition with Cross-Lingual Speech Representations

Luxembourgish is a West Germanic language spoken by roughly 390,000 people, mainly in Luxembourg. It is one of Europe’s under-described and under-resourced languages, not extensively investigated in the context of speech recognition. We explore the self-supervised multilingual learning of Luxembourgish speech representations for the speech recognition downstream task. We show that learning cross-lingual representations is essential for low-resourced languages such as Luxembourgish. Learning cross-lingual representations and rescoring the output transcriptions with language modelling while using only 4 hours of labelled speech achieves a word error rate of 15.1% and improves our Transfer Learning baseline model relatively by 33.1% and absolutely by 7.5%. Increasing the amount of labelled speech to 14 hours yields a significant performance gain resulting in a 9.3% word error rate.

2022 IEEE Spoken Language Technology Workshop (SLT)