textless-lib: a Library for Textless Spoken Language Processing

Abstract: Textless spoken language processing is an exciting area of research that promises to extend applicability of the standard NLP toolset onto spoken language and languages with few or no textual resources.Here, we introduce textless-lib, a PyTorch-based library aimed to facilitate research in the area. We describe the building blocks that the library provides and demonstrate its usability by discuss three different use-case examples: (i) speaker probing, (ii) speech resynthesis and compression, and (iii) speech continuation. We believe that textless-lib substantially simplifies research the textless setting and will be handful not only for speech researchers but also for the NLP community at large.