Cross-lingual Knowledge Transfer and Iterative Pseudo-labeling for Low-Resource Speech Recognition with Transducers

Voice technology has become ubiquitous recently. However, the accuracy, and hence experience, in different languages varies significantly, which makes the technology not equally inclusive. The availability of data for different languages is one of the key factors affecting accuracy, especially in training of all-neural end-to-end automatic speech recognition systems. Cross-lingual knowledge transfer and iterative pseudo-labeling are two techniques that have been shown to be successful for improving the accuracy of ASR systems, in particular for low-resource languages, like Ukrainian. Our goal is to train an all-neural Transducer-based ASR system to replace a DNN-HMM hybrid system with no manually annotated training data. We show that the Transducer system trained using transcripts produced by the hybrid system achieves 18% reduction in terms of word error rate. However, using a combination of cross-lingual knowledge transfer from related languages and iterative pseudo-labeling, we are able to achieve 35% reduction of the error rate.