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Improving the Inclusivity of Dutch Speech Recognition by Fine-tuning Whisper on the JASMIN-CGN Corpus

24 Feb 2025arXiv:2502.17284archive 2025-07-28

Golshid Shekoufandeh, Paul Boersma, Antal Van den Bosch

We test and study the variation in speech recognition of fine-tuned versions of the Whisper model on child, elderly and non-native Dutch speech from the JASMIN-CGN corpus. Our primary goal is to evaluate how speakers' age and linguistic background influence Whisper's performance. Whisper achieves varying Word Error Rates (WER) when fine-tuned on subpopulations of specific ages and linguistic backgrounds. Fine-tuned performance is remarkably better than zero-shot performance, achieving a relative reduction in WER of 81% for native children, 72% for non-native children, 67% for non-native adults, and 65% for native elderly people. Our findings underscore the importance of training speech recognition models like Whisper on underrepresented subpopulations such as children, the elderly, and non-native speakers.

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Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR)Speech Recognitionspeech-recognition

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