{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-theory-of-unsupervised-speech-recognition","title":"A Theory of Unsupervised Speech Recognition","arxiv_id":"2306.07926","date":"2023-06-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Liming Wang","Mark Hasegawa-Johnson","Chang D. Yoo"],"abstract":"Unsupervised speech recognition (ASR-U) is the problem of learning automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems from unpaired speech-only and text-only corpora. While various algorithms exist to solve this problem, a theoretical framework is missing from studying their properties and addressing such issues as sensitivity to hyperparameters and training instability. In this paper, we proposed a general theoretical framework to study the properties of ASR-U systems based on random matrix theory and the theory of neural tangent kernels. Such a framework allows us to prove various learnability conditions and sample complexity bounds of ASR-U. Extensive ASR-U experiments on synthetic languages with three classes of transition graphs provide strong empirical evidence for our theory (code available at cactuswiththoughts/UnsupASRTheory.git).","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.07926v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2306.07926v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-theory-of-unsupervised-speech-recognition","repo_url":"https://github.com/cactuswiththoughts/unsupasrtheory","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"automatic-speech-recognition-2","task_name":"Automatic Speech Recognition"},{"task_slug":"automatic-speech-recognition","task_name":"Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)"},{"task_slug":"speech-recognition","task_name":"Speech Recognition"},{"task_slug":"unsupervised-speech-recognition","task_name":"Unsupervised Speech Recognition"},{"task_slug":"speech-recognition-1","task_name":"speech-recognition"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2306.07926","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2306.07926","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}