AccentFold: A Journey through African Accents for Zero-Shot ASR Adaptation to Target Accents

Despite advancements in speech recognition, accented speech remains challenging. While previous approaches have focused on modeling techniques or creating accented speech datasets, gathering sufficient data for the multitude of accents, particularly in the African context, remains impractical due to their sheer diversity and associated budget constraints. To address these challenges, we propose \textit{AccentFold}, a method that exploits spatial relationships between learned accent embeddings to improve downstream Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Our exploratory analysis of speech embeddings representing 100+ African accents …

accents asr budget constraints context cs.cl cs.sd data datasets diversity eess.as journey modeling recognition speech speech recognition through zero-shot