# Does language matter for spoken word classification? A multilingual generative meta-learning approach

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.13084 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13084/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 16 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning for Fast Adaptation of Deep Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03400/) (2017)
- [Prototypical Networks for Few-shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.05175/) (2017)
- [Meta-Learning in Neural Networks: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05439/) (2020)
- [Deep Spoken Keyword Spotting: An Overview](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.10592/) (2021)
- [Few-Shot Keyword Spotting in Any Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.01454/) (2021)
- [The taste of IPA: Towards open-vocabulary keyword spotting and forced alignment in any language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08323/) (2023)
- [Learning to Continually Learn with the Bayesian Principle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18758/) (2024)
- [Good practices for evaluation of machine learning systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03700/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Meta-learning has been shown to have better performance than supervised learning for few-shot monolingual spoken word classification. However, the meta-learning approach remains under-explored in multilingual spoken word classification. In this paper, we apply the Generative Meta-Continual Learning algorithm to spoken word classification. The generative nature of this algorithm makes it viable for use in application, and the meta-learning aspect promotes generalisation, which is crucial in a multilingual setting. We train monolingual models on English, German, French, and Catalan, a bilingual model on English and German, and a multilingual model on all four languages. We find that although the multilingual model performs best, the differences between model performance is unexpectedly low. We also find that the hours of unique data seen during training seems to be a stronger performance indicator than the number of languages included in the training data.