Papers › Exploiting Adapters for Cross-lingual Low-resource Speech Recognition

Exploiting Adapters for Cross-lingual Low-resource Speech Recognition

18 May 2021arXiv:2105.11905archive 2025-07-28

Wenxin Hou, Han Zhu, Yidong Wang, Jindong Wang, Tao Qin, Renjun Xu, Takahiro Shinozaki

Cross-lingual speech adaptation aims to solve the problem of leveraging multiple rich-resource languages to build models for a low-resource target language. Since the low-resource language has limited training data, speech recognition models can easily overfit. In this paper, we propose to use adapters to investigate the performance of multiple adapters for parameter-efficient cross-lingual speech adaptation. Based on our previous MetaAdapter that implicitly leverages adapters, we propose a novel algorithms called SimAdapter for explicitly learning knowledge from adapters. Our algorithm leverages adapters which can be easily integrated into the Transformer structure.MetaAdapter leverages meta-learning to transfer the general knowledge from training data to the test language. SimAdapter aims to learn the similarities between the source and target languages during fine-tuning using the adapters. We conduct extensive experiments on five-low-resource languages in Common Voice dataset. Results demonstrate that our MetaAdapter and SimAdapter methods can reduce WER by 2.98% and 2.55% with only 2.5% and 15.5% of trainable parameters compared to the strong full-model fine-tuning baseline. Moreover, we also show that these two novel algorithms can be integrated for better performance with up to 3.55% relative WER reduction.

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jindongwang/transferlearning officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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Cross-Lingual ASRGeneral KnowledgeMeta-LearningSpeech Recognitionspeech-recognition

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Introduced by this paper: SimAdapter

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSimAdapterSoftmaxTransformer

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