# Performance Analysis of Speech Encoders for Low-Resource SLU and ASR in Tunisian Dialect

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.04533 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04533/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 32 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [HuBERT: Self-Supervised Speech Representation Learning by Masked Prediction of Hidden Units](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.07447/) (2021)
- [WavLM: Large-Scale Self-Supervised Pre-Training for Full Stack Speech Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.13900/) (2021)
- [fairseq: A Fast, Extensible Toolkit for Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01038/) (2019)
- [data2vec: A General Framework for Self-supervised Learning in Speech, Vision and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03555/) (2022)
- [SUPERB: Speech processing Universal PERformance Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.01051/) (2021)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [VoxPopuli: A Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Corpus for Representation Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00390/) (2021)
- [Scaling Speech Technology to 1,000+ Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13516/) (2023)
- [SpeechBrain: A General-Purpose Speech Toolkit](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04624/) (2021)
- [W2v-BERT: Combining Contrastive Learning and Masked Language Modeling for Self-Supervised Speech Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06209/) (2021)
- [Seamless: Multilingual Expressive and Streaming Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.05187/) (2023)
- [TERA: Self-Supervised Learning of Transformer Encoder Representation for Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.06028/) (2020)
- [An Unsupervised Autoregressive Model for Speech Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03240/) (2019)
- [SONAR: Sentence-Level Multimodal and Language-Agnostic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11466/) (2023)
- [ML-SUPERB: Multilingual Speech Universal PERformance Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10615/) (2023)
- [End-to-end Named Entity Recognition from English Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11184/) (2020)
- [SAMU-XLSR: Semantically-Aligned Multimodal Utterance-level Cross-Lingual Speech Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08180/) (2022)
- [ArTST: Arabic Text and Speech Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16621/) (2023)
- [End-to-end named entity extraction from speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.12045/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [SENSE models: an open source solution for multilingual and multimodal semantic-based tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.12093/) (2025)
- [ADI-20: Arabic Dialect Identification dataset and models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10070/) (2025)
- [Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for African Low-Resource Languages: A Systematic Literature Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01145/) (2025)
- [Ara-Best-RQ: Multi Dialectal Arabic SSL](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21900/) (2026)
- [Tone recognition in low-resource languages of North-East India: peeling the layers of SSL-based speech models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03606/) (2025)
- [SLURP-TN : Resource for Tunisian Dialect Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21940/) (2026)
- [NADI 2026: The Second Multidialectal Arabic Speech Processing Shared Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27086/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Speech encoders pretrained through self-supervised learning (SSL) have demonstrated remarkable performance in various downstream tasks, including Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). For instance, fine-tuning SSL models for such tasks has shown significant potential, leading to improvements in the SOTA performance across challenging datasets. In contrast to existing research, this paper contributes by comparing the effectiveness of SSL approaches in the context of (i) the low-resource spoken Tunisian Arabic dialect and (ii) its combination with a low-resource SLU and ASR scenario, where only a few semantic annotations are available for fine-tuning. We conduct experiments using many SSL speech encoders on the TARIC-SLU dataset. We use speech encoders that were pre-trained on either monolingual or multilingual speech data. Some of them have also been refined without in-domain nor Tunisian data through multimodal supervised teacher-student paradigm. This study yields numerous significant findings that we are discussing in this paper.