{"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/improving-children-s-speech-recognition-by","title":"Improving Children's Speech Recognition by Fine-tuning Self-supervised Adult Speech Representations","arxiv_id":"2211.07769","date":"2022-11-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Renee Lu","Mostafa Shahin","Beena Ahmed"],"abstract":"Children's speech recognition is a vital, yet largely overlooked domain when building inclusive speech technologies. The major challenge impeding progress in this domain is the lack of adequate child speech corpora; however, recent advances in self-supervised learning have created a new opportunity for overcoming this problem of data scarcity. In this paper, we leverage self-supervised adult speech representations and use three well-known child speech corpora to build models for children's speech recognition. We assess the performance of fine-tuning on both native and non-native children's speech, examine the effect of cross-domain child corpora, and investigate the minimum amount of child speech required to fine-tune a model which outperforms a state-of-the-art adult model. We also analyze speech recognition performance across children's ages. Our results demonstrate that fine-tuning with cross-domain child corpora leads to relative improvements of up to 46.08% and 45.53% for native and non-native child speech respectively, and absolute improvements of 14.70% and 31.10%. We also show that with as little as 5 hours of transcribed children's speech, it is possible to fine-tune a children's speech recognition system that outperforms a state-of-the-art adult model fine-tuned on 960 hours of adult speech.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.07769v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2211.07769v1.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":"improving-children-s-speech-recognition-by","repo_url":"https://github.com/monomest/thesis","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"self-supervised-learning","task_name":"Self-Supervised Learning"},{"task_slug":"speech-recognition","task_name":"Speech Recognition"},{"task_slug":"speech-recognition-1","task_name":"speech-recognition"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2211.07769","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}