MASR: Multi-Label Aware Speech Representation

In the recent years, speech representation learning is constructed primarily as a self-supervised learning (SSL) task, using the raw audio signal alone, while ignoring the sideinformation that is often available for a given speech recording. Incorporation of side information in existing techniques is constrained to a specific category of meta-data, thereby imposing limitations. Furthermore, these approaches exhibit inefficiencies in their utilization of such information. In this paper, we propose MASR , a Multi-label Aware Speech Representation learning framework, which addresses the aforementioned limitations. MASR enables the inclusion of external knowledge sources to enhance the utilization of meta-data information. Using MASR representations, we perform evaluation on several downstream tasks such as language identification and speech recognition. In these experiments, we illustrate significant performance improvements for the MASR over other established benchmarks. A key advantage of the MASR is that it can be combined with any choice of SSL method. We perform a detailed analysis on the language identification task which illustrates how the proposed loss function enables the representations to separate closely related languages. We also investigate the application of the proposed approach for other non-semantic tasks such as speaker and emotion recognition.

• Machine Intelligence

• Speech Processing