Authors
Golshid Shekoufandeh
P.P.G. Boersma
A.P.J. van den Bosch
Date (dd-mm-yyyy)
2025-02
Title
Improving the inclusivity of Dutch speech recognition by fine-tuning Whisper on the JASMIN-CGN corpus
Publication Year
2025-02
Number of pages
6
Document type
Paper
Abstract
We test and study the variation in speech recognition of fine-tuned versions of the Whisper model on child, elderly and non-native Dutch speech from the JASMIN-CGN corpus. Our primary goal is to evaluate how speakers' age and linguistic background influence Whisper's performance. Whisper achieves varying Word Error Rates (WER) when fine-tuned on subpopulations of specific ages and linguistic backgrounds. Fine-tuned performance is remarkably better than zero-shot performance, achieving a relative reduction in WER of 81% for native children, 72% for non-native children, 67% for non-native adults, and 65% for native elderly people. Our findings underscore the importance of training speech recognition models like Whisper on underrepresented subpopulations such as children, the elderly, and non-native speakers.
URL
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Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/11245.1/5170d721-b11f-4861-82a5-504c7ae9cb80