In speech recognition, it is essential to model the phonetic content of the input signal while discarding irrelevant factors such as speaker variations and noise, which is challenging in low-resource settings. Self-supervised pre-training has been proposed as a way to improve both supervised and unsupervised speech recognition, including frame-level feature representations and Acoustic Word Embeddings (AWE) for variable-length segments. However, self-supervised models alone cannot learn perfect separation of the linguistic content as they are trained to optimize indirect objectives. In this work, we experiment with different pre-trained self-supervised features as input to AWE models and show that they work best within a supervised framework. Models trained on English can be transferred to other languages with no adaptation and outperform self-supervised models trained solely on the target languages.
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