{"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/whistle-data-efficient-multilingual-and","title":"Whistle: Data-Efficient Multilingual and Crosslingual Speech Recognition via Weakly Phonetic Supervision","arxiv_id":"2406.02166","date":"2024-06-04","proceeding":null,"authors":["Saierdaer Yusuyin","Te Ma","Hao Huang","Wenbo Zhao","Zhijian Ou"],"abstract":"There exist three approaches for multilingual and crosslingual automatic speech recognition (MCL-ASR) - supervised pretraining with phonetic or graphemic transcription, and self-supervised pretraining. We find that pretraining with phonetic supervision has been underappreciated so far for MCL-ASR, while conceptually it is more advantageous for information sharing between different languages. This paper explores the approach of pretraining with weakly phonetic supervision towards data-efficient MCL-ASR, which is called Whistle. We relax the requirement of gold-standard human-validated phonetic transcripts, and obtain International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) based transcription by leveraging the LanguageNet grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) models. We construct a common experimental setup based on the CommonVoice dataset, called CV-Lang10, with 10 seen languages and 2 unseen languages. A set of experiments are conducted on CV-Lang10 to compare, as fair as possible, the three approaches under the common setup for MCL-ASR. Experiments demonstrate the advantages of phoneme-based models (Whistle) for MCL-ASR, in terms of speech recognition for seen languages, crosslingual performance for unseen languages with different amounts of few-shot data, overcoming catastrophic forgetting, and training efficiency. It is found that when training data is more limited, phoneme supervision can achieve better results compared to subword supervision and self-supervision, thereby providing higher data-efficiency. To support reproducibility and promote future research along this direction, we release the code, models and data for the entire pipeline of Whistle at https://github.com/thu-spmi/CAT/tree/master/egs/cv-lang10.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.02166v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2406.02166v2.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":"whistle-data-efficient-multilingual-and","repo_url":"https://github.com/thu-spmi/cat","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":"speech-recognition","task_name":"Speech Recognition"},{"task_slug":"speech-recognition-1","task_name":"speech-recognition"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"set","method_name":"SET"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2406.02166","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}