Synthetic Cross-accent Data Augmentation for Automatic Speech Recognition

The awareness for biased ASR datasets or models has increased notably in recent years. Even for English, despite a vast amount of available training data, systems perform worse for non-native speakers. In this work, we improve an accent-conversion model (ACM) which transforms native US-English speech into accented pronunciation. We include phonetic knowledge in the ACM training to provide accurate feedback about how well certain pronunciation patterns were recovered in the synthesized waveform. Furthermore, we investigate the feasibility of learned accent representations instead of static embeddings. Generated data was then used to train two state-of-the-art ASR systems. We evaluated our approach on native and non-native English datasets and found that synthetically accented data helped the ASR to better understand speech from seen accents. This observation did not translate to unseen accents, and it was not observed for a model that had been pre-trained exclusively with native speech.