Zero Resource Code-Switched Speech Benchmark Using Speech Utterance Pairs for Multiple Spoken Languages

Abstract

We introduce a new zero resource code-switched speech bench-mark designed to assess the code-switching capabilities of self-supervised speech encoders directly. We showcase a baseline system of language modeling on discrete units to demonstrate how the code-switching abilities of speech encoders can be assessed in a zero-resource manner. Our experiments encompass a variety of well-known speech encoders, including Wav2vec 2.0, HuBERT, XLSR, etc., on three tracks of different code-switched language pairs: Spanish-English, French-English, and Chinese-English. We examine the impact of pre-training languages and model size on benchmark performance. Notably, though our results demonstrate that speech encoders with multilingual pre-training, exemplified by XLSR, outperform monolingual variants (Wav2vec 2.0, HuBERT) in code-switching scenarios, there is still substantial room for improvement in their code-switching linguistic abilities.