CommonAccent: Exploring Large Acoustic Pretrained Models for Accent
  Classification Based on Common Voice
Juan Zuluaga-Gomez Sara Ahmed Danielius Visockas Cem Subakan
Despite the recent advancements in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), the
recognition of accented speech still remains a dominant problem. In order to
create more inclusive ASR systems, research has shown that the integration of
accent information, as part of a larger ASR framework, can lead to the
mitigation of accented speech errors. We address multilingual accent
classification through the ECAPA-TDNN and Wav2Vec 2.0/XLSR architectures which
have been proven to perform well on a variety of speech-related downstream
tasks. We introduce a simple-to-follow recipe aligned to the SpeechBrain
toolkit for accent classification based on Common Voice 7.0 (English) and
Common Voice 11.0 (Italian, German, and Spanish). Furthermore, we establish new
state-of-the-art for English accent classification with as high as 95%
accuracy. We also study the internal categorization of the Wav2Vev 2.0
embeddings through t-SNE, noting that there is a level of clustering based on
phonological similarity. (Our recipe is open-source in the SpeechBrain toolkit,
see: https://github.com/speechbrain/speechbrain/tree/develop/recipes)