Multilingual Acoustic Word Embedding Models For Processing Zero-Resource Languages

Here we propose to train a single supervised embedding model on labelled data from multiple well-resourced languages and then apply it to unseen zero-resource languages. For this transfer learning approach, we consider two multilingual recurrent neural network models: a discriminative classifier trained on the joint vocabularies of all training languages, and a correspondence autoencoder trained to reconstruct word pairs. We test these using a word discrimination task on six target zero-resource languages. When trained on seven well-resourced languages, both models perform similarly and outperform unsupervised models trained on the zero-resource languages. With just a single training language, the second model works better, but performance depends more on the particular training--testing language pair.