Repository logo
 

Learn and Don’t Forget: Adding a New Language to ASR Foundation Models

Accepted version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Conference Object

Change log

Authors

Qian, Mengjie 
Tang, Siyuan 
Ma, Rao 
Knill, Katherine 
Gales, Mark 

Abstract

Foundation ASR models often support many languages, e.g. 100 languages in Whisper. However, there has been limited work on integrating an additional, typically low-resource, language, while maintaining performance on the original language set. Fine-tuning, while simple, may degrade the accuracy of the original set. We compare three approaches that exploit adaptation parameters: soft language code tuning, train only the language code; soft prompt tuning, train prepended tokens; and LoRA where a small set of additional parameters are optimised. Elastic Weight Consolidation (EWC) offers an alternative compromise with the potential to maintain performance in specific target languages. Results show that direct fine-tuning yields the best performance for the new language but degrades existing language capabilities. EWC can address this issue for specific languages. If only adaptation parameters are used, the language capabilities are maintained but at the cost of performance in the new language.

Description

Keywords

Journal Title

Conference Name

Interspeech 2024 - 25th Interspeech Conference

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Publisher DOI

Publisher URL