ASR-Generated Text for Language Model Pre-training Applied to Speech Tasks

Abstract: We aim at improving spoken language modeling (LM) using very large amount of automatically transcribed speech. We leverage the INA (French National Audiovisual Institute) collection and obtain 19GB of text after applying ASR on 350,000 hours of diverse TV shows. From this, spoken LLMs are trained either by fine-tuning an existing LM (FlauBERT) or through training a LM from scratch. New models (FlauBERT-Oral) are shared with the community and evaluated for 3 downstream tasks: spoken language understanding, classification of TV shows and speech syntactic parsing. Results show that FlauBERT-Oral can be beneficial compared to its initial FlauBERT version demonstrating that, despite its inherent noisy nature, ASR-generated text can be used to build spoken LLMs.