# A Comparative Analysis of Bilingual and Trilingual Wav2Vec Models for Automatic Speech Recognition in Multilingual Oral History Archives

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.17160 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.17160/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 18 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [XLS-R: Self-supervised Cross-lingual Speech Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09296/) (2021)
- [Libri-Light: A Benchmark for ASR with Limited or No Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.07875/) (2019)
- [VoxPopuli: A Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Corpus for Representation Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00390/) (2021)
- [Challenging the Boundaries of Speech Recognition: The MALACH Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03455/) (2019)
- [Transformer-based Automatic Speech Recognition of Formal and Colloquial Czech in MALACH Project](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.07666/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Self-supervised learning of speech representations with Dutch archival data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.04554/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Audio-Visual Data to Reduce the Multilingual Gap in Self-Supervised Speech Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.17523/) (2025)
- [From 2.1M Hours of Raw Broadcast Audio to Finnish Speech SSL: Confidence Filtering and Architectural Analysis at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.13102/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we are comparing monolingual Wav2Vec 2.0 models with various multilingual models to see whether we could improve speech recognition performance on a unique oral history archive containing a lot of mixed-language sentences. Our main goal is to push forward research on this unique dataset, which is an extremely valuable part of our cultural heritage. Our results suggest that monolingual speech recognition models are, in most cases, superior to multilingual models, even when processing the oral history archive full of mixed-language sentences from non-native speakers. We also performed the same experiments on the public CommonVoice dataset to verify our results. We are contributing to the research community by releasing our pre-trained models to the public.
