Title |
Borrowing Language Resources for Development of Automatic Speech Recognition for Low- and Middle-Density Languages |
Authors |
Lynette Melnar and Chen Liu |
Abstract |
In this paper we describe an approach that both creates crosslingual acoustic monophone model sets for speech recognition tasks and objectively predicts their performance without target-language speech data or acoustic measurement techniques. This strategy is based on a series of linguistic metrics characterizing the articulatory phonetic and phonological distances of target-language phonemes from source-language phonemes. We term these algorithms the Combined Phonetic and Phonological Crosslingual Distance (CPP-CD) metric and the Combined Phonetic and Phonological Crosslingual Prediction (CPP-CP) metric. The particular motivations for this project are the current unavailability and often prohibitively high production cost of speech databases for many strategically important low- and middle-density languages. First, we describe the CPP-CD approach and compare the performance of CPP-CD-specified models to both native language models and crosslingual models selected by the Bhattacharyya acoustic-model distance metric in automatic speech recognition (ASR) experiments. Results confirm that the CPP-CD approach nearly matches those achieved by the acoustic distance metric. We then test the CPP-CP algorithm on the CPP-CD models by comparing the CPP-CP scores to the recognition phoneme error rates. Based on this comparison, we conclude that the CPP-CP algorithm is a reliable indicator of crosslingual model performance in speech recognition tasks. |
Language |
Multiple languages |
Topics |
Speech recognition and understanding, Corpus (creation, annotation, etc.), Multilinguality |
Full paper |
Borrowing Language Resources for Development of Automatic Speech Recognition for Low- and Middle-Density Languages |
Slides |
Borrowing Language Resources for Development of Automatic Speech Recognition for Low- and Middle-Density Languages |
Bibtex |
@InProceedings{MELNAR08.68,
author = {Lynette Melnar and Chen Liu},
title = {Borrowing Language Resources for Development of Automatic Speech Recognition for Low- and Middle-Density Languages},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)},
year = {2008},
month = {may},
date = {28-30},
address = {Marrakech, Morocco},
editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair), Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias},
publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)},
isbn = {2-9517408-4-0},
note = {http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/},
language = {english}
} |