Joint Training Framework for Accent and Speech Recognition Based on Conformer Low-Rank Adaptation

In real-world scenarios, accent variations often reduce Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) accuracy. Addressing this typically involves a multi-task ASR and Accent Recognition (ASR-AR) framework, but there is limited research on optimizing task-specific feature extraction and enhancing ASR with AR information. This study introduces the Conformer Low-rank Adaptation for Joint Accent and Speech Recognition (CLAnSR), employing LoRA to augment both ASR and AR capabilities using a shared pre-trained base encoder. This approach significantly reduces the model’s parameter and training resource demands while facilitating the extraction of task-specific features. Additionally, we have incorporated accent-aware multi-channel embedding layers, which through spatially independent embeddings, enhance the model’s capacity to accurately represent tokens across diverse dialectical contexts. Tested on the KeSpeech dataset, CLAnSR reaches state-of-the-art AR accuracy 80.41% and competitive ASR CER 8.39%, outperforming non-LLM systems and matching those with LLMs. It reduces parameters by 34.02% and enhances both ASR and AR performance, effectively handling speech dialect variations and advancing the field.