A Theory of Unsupervised Speech Recognition
Liming Wang, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson, Chang Yoo
Abstract
Unsupervised speech recognition ({pasted macro ‘ASRU’}/) is the problem of learning automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems from unpaired speech-only and text-only corpora. While various algorithms exist to solve this problem, a theoretical framework is missing to study their properties and address such issues as sensitivity to hyperparameters and training instability. In this paper, we proposed a general theoretical framework to study the properties of {pasted macro ‘ASRU’}/ systems based on random matrix theory and the theory of neural tangent kernels. Such a framework allows us to prove various learnability conditions and sample complexity bounds of {pasted macro ‘ASRU’}/. Extensive {pasted macro ‘ASRU’}/ experiments on synthetic languages with three classes of transition graphs provide strong empirical evidence for our theory (code available at https://github.com/cactuswiththoughts/UnsupASRTheory.gitcactuswiththoughts/UnsupASRTheory.git).
BibTeX
@inproceedings{wang-etal-2023-theory,
title = "A Theory of Unsupervised Speech Recognition",
author = "Wang, Liming and
Hasegawa-Johnson, Mark and
Yoo, Chang",
editor = "Rogers, Anna and
Boyd-Graber, Jordan and
Okazaki, Naoaki",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2023",
address = "Toronto, Canada",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.67/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.67",
pages = "1192--1215"
}