Bayesian Models for Unit Discovery on a Very Low Resource Language

Developing speech technologies for low-resource languages has become a very active research field over the last decade. Among others, Bayesian models have shown some promising results on artificial examples but still lack of in situ experiments. Our work applies state-of-the-art Bayesian models to unsupervised Acoustic Unit Discovery (AUD) in a real low-resource language scenario. We also show that Bayesian models can naturally integrate information from other resourceful languages by means of informative prior leading to more consistent discovered units. Finally, discovered acoustic units are used, either as the 1-best sequence or as a lattice, to perform word segmentation. Word segmentation results show that this Bayesian approach clearly outperforms a Segmental-DTW baseline on the same corpus.Comment: Accepted to ICASSP 201

Speech recognition and keyword spotting for low-resource languages : Babel project research at CUED

Recently there has been increased interest in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) and Key Word Spotting (KWS) systems for low resource languages. One of the driving forces for this research direction is the IARPA Babel project. This paper describes some of the research funded by this project at Cambridge University, as part of the Lorelei team co-ordinated by IBM. A range of topics are discussed including: deep neural network based acoustic models; data augmentation; and zero acoustic model resource systems. Performance for all approaches is evaluated using the Limited (approximately 10 hours) and/or Full (approximately 80 hours) language packs distributed by IARPA. Both KWS and ASR performance figures are given. Though absolute performance varies from language to language, and keyword list, the approaches described show consistent trends over the languages investigated to date. Using comparable systems over the five Option Period 1 languages indicates a strong correlation between ASR performance and KWS performance

Towards the automatic processing of Yongning Na (Sino-Tibetan): developing a 'light' acoustic model of the target language and testing 'heavyweight' models from five national languages

International audienceAutomatic speech processing technologies hold great potential to facilitate the urgent task of documenting the world's languages. The present research aims to explore the application of speech recognition tools to a little-documented language, with a view to facilitating processes of annotation, transcription and linguistic analysis. The target language is Yongning Na (a.k.a. Mosuo), an unwritten Sino-Tibetan language with less than 50,000 speakers. An acoustic model of Na was built using CMU Sphinx. In addition to this 'light' model, trained on a small data set (only 4 hours of speech from 1 speaker), 'heavyweight' models from five national languages (English, French, Chinese, Vietnamese and Khmer) were also applied to the same data. Preliminary results are reported, and perspectives for the long road ahead are outlined

Establishing a Role for Minority Source Language in Multilingual Facilitation

This is a contribution to a festschrift.This document is dedicated to a young man, who, despite the number of times he has traveled around the Sun, is always open to new thoughts on ways to include languages, especially the smaller ones, and the people who speak them in far-reaching and sustainable open-source de- velopment. Since Trond Trosterud in Tromsø is attributed a terrific track record in transnational and circum-polar linguistics, we try to attract his attention further afield, to languages and phe- nomena he has only touched. The language phenomena addressed here come from Erzya and the Zyrian variety of Komi; Erzya has issues presented but not discussed in his dissertation, whereas Komi brings in issues of adnominal and predicate number marking in conjunction with case homonymy that have been resolved thanks to the flexibility of the infrastructure. These source languages, like others, have documented new dimensions and added shape the ever- growing infrastructure.Peer reviewe

Методика выбора фонемного набора для автоматического распознавания русской речи

In the paper, selection of best phoneme set for Russian automatic speech recognition is described. For the acoustic modeling, we describe a method based on combination of knowledge-based and statistical approaches to create several different phoneme sets. Applying this method to the Russian phonetic set of the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) alphabet, we first reduced it to 47 phonological units and derived several other phoneme sets with different number of phonological units from 27 till 47. Speech recognition experiments using these sets showed that reduced phoneme sets are better for phoneme recognition task and as good for word level speech recognition. For experiment with extra-large vocabulary, we used syntactico-statistical language model, which allowed us to achieve the word recognition accuracy of 73.1%. The results correspond to continuous Russian speech recognition quality obtained by other organizations up to date.В статье описывается выбор оптимального фонемного набора для системы автоматического распознавания русской речи. При создании акустических моделей был предложен комбинированный метод для выбора наилучшего фонемного набора, объединяющий статистическую информацию и фонетические знания. В результате применения данного метода к русскому фонетическому набору алфавита IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) был получен набор из 47 фонологических единиц, который был преобразован в несколько фонемных наборов с разным размером от 27 до 47 единиц. Эксперименты по распознаванию речи показали, что использование сокращенных фонемных наборов позволяет увеличить точность распознавания фонем. В ходе экспериментов с применением расширенной языковой модели и сверхбольшим словарем точность распознавания слов составила 73,1%. Полученные результаты соответствуют качеству распознавания слитной русской речи, полученному на настоящий момент другими организациями

Semi-supervised and Active-learning Scenarios: Efficient Acoustic Model Refinement for a Low Resource Indian Language

We address the problem of efficient acoustic-model refinement (continuous retraining) using semi-supervised and active learning for a low resource Indian language, wherein the low resource constraints are having i) a small labeled corpus from which to train a baseline `seed' acoustic model and ii) a large training corpus without orthographic labeling or from which to perform a data selection for manual labeling at low costs. The proposed semi-supervised learning decodes the unlabeled large training corpus using the seed model and through various protocols, selects the decoded utterances with high reliability using confidence levels (that correlate to the WER of the decoded utterances) and iterative bootstrapping. The proposed active learning protocol uses confidence level based metric to select the decoded utterances from the large unlabeled corpus for further labeling. The semi-supervised learning protocols can offer a WER reduction, from a poorly trained seed model, by as much as 50% of the best WER-reduction realizable from the seed model's WER, if the large corpus were labeled and used for acoustic-model training. The active learning protocols allow that only 60% of the entire training corpus be manually labeled, to reach the same performance as the entire data

Amharic Speech Recognition for Speech Translation

International audienceThe state-of-the-art speech translation can be seen as a cascade of Automatic Speech Recognition, Statistical Machine Translation and Text-To-Speech synthesis. In this study an attempt is made to experiment on Amharic speech recognition for Amharic-English speech translation in tourism domain. Since there is no Amharic speech corpus, we developed a read-speech corpus of 7.43hr in tourism domain. The Amharic speech corpus has been recorded after translating standard Basic Traveler Expression Corpus (BTEC) under a normal working environment. In our ASR experiments phoneme and syllable units are used for acoustic models, while morpheme and word are used for language models. Encouraging ASR results are achieved using morpheme-based language models and phoneme-based acoustic models with a recognition accuracy result of 89.1%, 80.9%, 80.6%, and 49.3% at character, morph, word and sentence level respectively. We are now working towards designing Amharic-English speech translation through cascading components under different error correction algorithms

Cloud-based Automatic Speech Recognition Systems for Southeast Asian Languages

This paper provides an overall introduction of our Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems for Southeast Asian languages. As not much existing work has been carried out on such regional languages, a few difficulties should be addressed before building the systems: limitation on speech and text resources, lack of linguistic knowledge, etc. This work takes Bahasa Indonesia and Thai as examples to illustrate the strategies of collecting various resources required for building ASR systems.Comment: Published by the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Orange Technologies (ICOT 2017

FST Morphology for the Endangered Skolt Sami Language

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