Don't Stop Self-Supervision: Accent Adaptation of Speech Representations
  via Residual Adapters
Anshu Bhatia Sanchit Sinha Saket Dingliwal Karthik Gopalakrishnan Sravan Bodapati Katrin Kirchhoff
Speech representations learned in a self-supervised fashion from massive
unlabeled speech corpora have been adapted successfully toward several
downstream tasks. However, such representations may be skewed toward canonical
data characteristics of such corpora and perform poorly on atypical, non-native
accented speaker populations. With the state-of-the-art HuBERT model as a
baseline, we propose and investigate self-supervised adaptation of speech
representations to such populations in a parameter-efficient way via training
accent-specific residual adapters. We experiment with 4 accents and choose
automatic speech recognition (ASR) as the downstream task of interest. We
obtain strong word error rate reductions (WERR) over HuBERT-large for all 4
accents, with a mean WERR of 22.7% with accent-specific adapters and a mean
WERR of 25.1% if the entire encoder is accent-adapted. While our experiments
utilize HuBERT and ASR as the downstream task, our proposed approach is both
model and task-agnostic.