6,426 research outputs found
Speech Recognition Challenge in the Wild: Arabic MGB-3
This paper describes the Arabic MGB-3 Challenge - Arabic Speech Recognition
in the Wild. Unlike last year's Arabic MGB-2 Challenge, for which the
recognition task was based on more than 1,200 hours broadcast TV news
recordings from Aljazeera Arabic TV programs, MGB-3 emphasises dialectal Arabic
using a multi-genre collection of Egyptian YouTube videos. Seven genres were
used for the data collection: comedy, cooking, family/kids, fashion, drama,
sports, and science (TEDx). A total of 16 hours of videos, split evenly across
the different genres, were divided into adaptation, development and evaluation
data sets. The Arabic MGB-Challenge comprised two tasks: A) Speech
transcription, evaluated on the MGB-3 test set, along with the 10 hour MGB-2
test set to report progress on the MGB-2 evaluation; B) Arabic dialect
identification, introduced this year in order to distinguish between four major
Arabic dialects - Egyptian, Levantine, North African, Gulf, as well as Modern
Standard Arabic. Two hours of audio per dialect were released for development
and a further two hours were used for evaluation. For dialect identification,
both lexical features and i-vector bottleneck features were shared with
participants in addition to the raw audio recordings. Overall, thirteen teams
submitted ten systems to the challenge. We outline the approaches adopted in
each system, and summarise the evaluation results
On the Robustness of Arabic Speech Dialect Identification
Arabic dialect identification (ADI) tools are an important part of the
large-scale data collection pipelines necessary for training speech recognition
models. As these pipelines require application of ADI tools to potentially
out-of-domain data, we aim to investigate how vulnerable the tools may be to
this domain shift. With self-supervised learning (SSL) models as a starting
point, we evaluate transfer learning and direct classification from SSL
features. We undertake our evaluation under rich conditions, with a goal to
develop ADI systems from pretrained models and ultimately evaluate performance
on newly collected data. In order to understand what factors contribute to
model decisions, we carry out a careful human study of a subset of our data.
Our analysis confirms that domain shift is a major challenge for ADI models. We
also find that while self-training does alleviate this challenges, it may be
insufficient for realistic conditions
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