Latent Regression Bayesian Network for Speech Representation

In this paper, we present a novel approach for speech representation using latent regression Bayesian networks (LRBN) to address the issue of poor performance in low-resource language speech systems. LRBN, a lightweight unsupervised learning model, learns data distribution and high-level features, unlike computationally expensive large models, such as Wav2vec 2.0. To evaluate the effectiveness of LRBN in learning speech representations, we conducted experiments on five different low-resource languages and applied them to two downstream tasks: phoneme classification and speech recognition. Our experimental results demonstrate that LRBN outperforms prevailing speech representation methods in both tasks, highlighting its potential in the realm of speech representation learning for low-resource languages.