An Automatic Speech Recognition System for Bengali Language based on Wav2Vec2 and Transfer Learning

TL;DR

This paper presents a Bengali speech recognition system using Wav2Vec2 and transfer learning, achieving promising results with limited training data in a low-resource language context.

Contribution

It introduces a transfer learning-based end-to-end speech recognition approach tailored for Bengali, addressing data scarcity issues.

Findings

Achieved a Levenshtein Mean Distance score of 3.819 on test data

Effectively modeled Bengali speech with only 1000 training samples

Demonstrated potential for low-resource language ASR development

Abstract

An independent, automated method of decoding and transcribing oral speech is known as automatic speech recognition (ASR). A typical ASR system extracts feature from audio recordings or streams and run one or more algorithms to map the features to corresponding texts. Numerous of research has been done in the field of speech signal processing in recent years. When given adequate resources, both conventional ASR and emerging end-to-end (E2E) speech recognition have produced promising results. However, for low-resource languages like Bengali, the current state of ASR lags behind, although the low resource state does not reflect upon the fact that this language is spoken by over 500 million people all over the world. Despite its popularity, there aren't many diverse open-source datasets available, which makes it difficult to conduct research on Bengali speech recognition systems. This paper is a part of the competition named `BUET CSE Fest DL Sprint'. The purpose of this paper is to improve the speech recognition performance of the Bengali language by adopting speech recognition technology on the E2E structure based on the transfer learning framework. The proposed method effectively models the Bengali language and achieves 3.819 score in `Levenshtein Mean Distance' on the test dataset of 7747 samples, when only 1000 samples of train dataset were used to train.