Channel-Aware Pretraining of Joint Encoder-Decoder Self-Supervised Model for Telephonic-Speech ASR

This paper proposes a novel technique to obtain better downstream ASR performance from a joint encoder-decoder self-supervised model when trained with speech pooled from two different channels (narrow and wide band). The joint encoder-decoder self-supervised model extends the HuBERT model with a Transformer decoder. HuBERT performs clustering of features and predicts the class of every input frame. In simple pooling, which is our baseline, there is no way to identify the channel information. To incorporate channel information, we have proposed non-overlapping cluster IDs for speech from different channels. Our method gives a relative improvement of ~4% over the joint encoder-decoder self-supervised model built with simple pooling of data, which serves as our baseline.