An Adapter Based Pre-Training for Efficient and Scalable Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning

We present a method for transferring pre-trained self-supervised (SSL) speech representations to multiple languages. There is an abundance of unannotated speech, so creating self-supervised representations from raw audio and fine-tuning on small annotated datasets is a promising direction to build speech recognition systems. SSL models generally perform SSL on raw audio in a pre-training phase and then fine-tune on a small fraction of annotated data. Such models have produced state of the art results for ASR. However, these models are very expensive to pre-train. We use an existing wav2vec 2.0 model and tackle the problem of learning new language representations while utilizing existing model knowledge. Crucially we do so without catastrophic forgetting of the existing language representation. We use adapter modules to speed up pre-training a new language task. Our model can decrease pre-training times by 32% when learning a new language task, and learn this new audio-language representation without forgetting previous language representation. We evaluate by applying these language representations to automatic speech recognition.