2020/08/04 by Mengli Cheng, Chengyu Wang, Cheng, Mengli +7
Computer Science · #Audio and Speech Processing (eess.AS) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Music and Audio Processing #Sound (cs.SD) #Speech Recognition and Synthesis #Speech and Audio Processing #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2008.01300
openalex publication_date 2020/08/04 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Building Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems from scratch is significantly challenging, mostly due to the time-consuming and financially-expensive process of annotating a large amount of audio data with transcripts. Although several unsupervised pre-training models have been proposed, applying such models directly might still be sub-optimal if more labeled, training data could be obtained without a large cost. In this paper, we present a weakly supervised framework for constructing ASR systems with massive video data. As videos often contain human-speech audios aligned with subtitles, we consider videos as an important knowledge source, and propose an effective approach to extract high-quality audios aligned with transcripts from videos based on Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The underlying ASR model can be fine-tuned to fit any domain-specific target training datasets after weakly supervised pre-training. Extensive experiments show that our framework can easily produce state-of-the-art results on six public datasets for Mandarin speech recognition.