2021

XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale

Babu, Arun, Wang, Changhan, Tjandra, Andros et al.

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This paper presents XLS-R, a large-scale model for cross-lingual speech representation learning based on wav2vec 2.0.

  • We train models with up to 2B parameters on nearly half a million hours of publicly available speech audio in 128 languages, an order of magnitude more public data than the largest known prior work.
  • Our evaluation covers a wide range of tasks, domains, data regimes and languages, both high and low-resource.
  • On the CoVoST-2 speech translation benchmark, we improve the previous state of the art by an average of 7.4 BLEU over 21 translation directions into English.

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