Speech Collage: Code-Switched Audio Generation by Collaging Monolingual Corpora

Amir Hussein, Dorsa Zeinali, Ondrej Klejch, Matthew Wiesner, Brian Yan, Shammur Absar Chowdhury, Ahmed Ali, Shinji Watanabe, Sanjeev Khudanpur

Abstract: Designing effective automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for Code-Switching (CS) often depends on the availability of the transcribed CS resources. To address data scarcity, this paper introduces Speech Collage, a method that synthesizes CS data from monolingual corpora by splicing audio segments. We further improve the smoothness quality of audio generation using an overlap-add approach. We investigate the impact of generated data on speech recognition in two scenarios: using in-domain CS text and a zero-shot approach with synthesized CS text. Empirical results highlight up to 34.4% and 16.2% relative reductions in Mixed-Error Rate and Word-Error Rate for in-domain and zero-shot scenarios, respectively. Lastly, we demonstrate that CS augmentation bolsters the model’s code-switching inclination and reduces its monolingual bias.