Automatic Data Augmentation for Domain Adapted Fine-Tuning of
  Self-Supervised Speech Representations
Salah Zaiem Titouan Parcollet Slim Essid
Self-Supervised Learning (SSL) has allowed leveraging large amounts of
unlabeled speech data to improve the performance of speech recognition models
even with small annotated datasets. Despite this, speech SSL representations
may fail while facing an acoustic mismatch between the pretraining and target
datasets. To address this issue, we propose a novel supervised domain
adaptation method, designed for cases exhibiting such a mismatch in acoustic
domains. It consists in applying properly calibrated data augmentations on a
large clean dataset, bringing it closer to the target domain, and using it as
part of an initial fine-tuning stage. Augmentations are automatically selected
through the minimization of a conditional-dependence estimator, based on the
target dataset. The approach is validated during an oracle experiment with
controlled distortions and on two amateur-collected low-resource domains,
reaching better performances compared to the baselines in both cases.