Label Aware Speech Representation Learning For Language Identification

The speech representation learning approaches, for nonsemantic tasks like language recognition, have either explored supervised embedding extraction methods using a classifier model or the self-supervised representation learning approach using raw data. In this paper, we propose a novel framework of combining the self-supervised representation learning with the language label information for the pre-training task. This framework, termed as label aware speech representation learning (LASR), uses a triplet based objective function to incorporate the language labels along with the self-supervised loss function. The speech representations are further fine-tuned for the identification task. The language recognition experiments are performed on two public datasets - FLEURS and Dhwani. In these experiments, we illustrate that the proposed LASR framework improves over the state-of-art systems in terms of recognition performance. We also report an analysis of the robustness of the LASR approach to noisy/missing labels as well as the application of the LASR model for downstream multi-lingual speech recognition tasks.

• Machine Intelligence

• Speech Processing