Creating Task-Specific Speech Recognition Datasets from Scratch for Low-Resource Languages: Assessing the Impact of Token Sequence Overlap

Abstract

Creating a task-specific speech recognition dataset is essential for developing speech recognition applications in low-resource languages. Such applications have uses in agriculture, finance, healthcare, and others, and benefit individuals with low literacy. However, a significant challenge is the high cost of data creation. While there is some work around cost-effective dataset selection, there is little to no work on building a cost-effective dataset for a task from scratch. Our work contributes to the latter. We created a speech recognition dataset from scratch and conducted two major sets of experiments. The first aimed to observe the effect of different datasets of the same size on model performance. Our results confirmed that the same amount spent collecting data can have vastly different results. The second experiment analyzed the effect of token sequence overlap between target and training data since a natural and intuitive approach to building a dataset from scratch for task would be having the task tokens occur in the training data. Our experiments showed that token sequence overlap was not the primary factor influencing model performance. Our work provides a counter-intuitive insight into building speech recognition datasets from scratch in low-resource settings and shows the need for further investigation.

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