{"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/what-do-self-supervised-speech-models-know-1","title":"What do self-supervised speech models know about Dutch? Analyzing advantages of language-specific pre-training","arxiv_id":"2506.00981","date":"2025-06-01","proceeding":null,"authors":["Marianne de Heer Kloots","Hosein Mohebbi","Charlotte Pouw","Gaofei Shen","Willem Zuidema","Martijn Bentum"],"abstract":"How language-specific are speech representations learned by self-supervised models? Existing work has shown that a range of linguistic features can be successfully decoded from end-to-end models trained only on speech recordings. However, it's less clear to what extent pre-training on specific languages improves language-specific linguistic information. Here we test the encoding of Dutch phonetic and lexical information in internal representations of self-supervised Wav2Vec2 models. Pre-training exclusively on Dutch improves the representation of Dutch linguistic features as compared to pre-training on similar amounts of English or larger amounts of multilingual data. This language-specific advantage is well-detected by trained clustering or classification probes, and partially observable using zero-shot metrics. Furthermore, the language-specific benefit on linguistic feature encoding aligns with downstream performance on Automatic Speech Recognition.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.00981v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.00981v1.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":"what-do-self-supervised-speech-models-know-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/mdhk/ssl-nl-eval","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"automatic-speech-recognition-2","task_name":"Automatic Speech Recognition"},{"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":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}