Language Transfer of Audio Word2Vec: Learning Audio Segment Representations Without Target Language Data

Audio Word2Vec offers vector representations of fixed dimensionality for variable-length audio segments using Sequence to-sequence Autoencoder (SA). These vector representations are shown to describe the sequential phonetic structures of the audio segments to a good degree, with real world applications such as spoken term detection (STD). This paper examines the capability of language transfer of Audio Word2Vec. We train SA from one language (source language) and use it to extract the vector representation of the audio segments of another language (target language). We found that SA can still catch the phonetic structure from the audio segments of the target language if the source and target languages are similar. In STD, we obtain the vector representations from the SA learned from a large amount of source language data, and found them surpass the representations from naive encoder and SA directly learned from a small amount of target language data. The result shows that it is possible to learn Audio Word2Vec model from high-resource languages and use it on low-resource languages. This further expands the usability of Audio Word2Vec.