7,166 research outputs found
How speaker tongue and name source language affect the automatic recognition of spoken names
In this paper the automatic recognition of person names and geographical names uttered by native and non-native speakers is examined in an experimental set-up. The major aim was to raise our understanding of how well and under which circumstances previously proposed methods of multilingual pronunciation modeling and multilingual acoustic modeling contribute to a better name recognition in a cross-lingual context. To come to a meaningful interpretation of results we have categorized each language according to the amount of exposure a native speaker is expected to have had to this language. After having interpreted our results we have also tried to find an answer to the question of how much further improvement one might be able to attain with a more advanced pronunciation modeling technique which we plan to develop
Non-native children speech recognition through transfer learning
This work deals with non-native children's speech and investigates both
multi-task and transfer learning approaches to adapt a multi-language Deep
Neural Network (DNN) to speakers, specifically children, learning a foreign
language. The application scenario is characterized by young students learning
English and German and reading sentences in these second-languages, as well as
in their mother language. The paper analyzes and discusses techniques for
training effective DNN-based acoustic models starting from children native
speech and performing adaptation with limited non-native audio material. A
multi-lingual model is adopted as baseline, where a common phonetic lexicon,
defined in terms of the units of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), is
shared across the three languages at hand (Italian, German and English); DNN
adaptation methods based on transfer learning are evaluated on significant
non-native evaluation sets. Results show that the resulting non-native models
allow a significant improvement with respect to a mono-lingual system adapted
to speakers of the target language
Robust language recognition via adaptive language factor extraction
This paper presents a technique to adapt an acoustically based
language classifier to the background conditions and speaker
accents. This adaptation improves language classification on
a broad spectrum of TV broadcasts. The core of the system
consists of an iVector-based setup in which language and channel
variabilities are modeled separately. The subsequent language
classifier (the backend) operates on the language factors,
i.e. those features in the extracted iVectors that explain the observed
language variability. The proposed technique adapts the
language variability model to the background conditions and
to the speaker accents present in the audio. The effect of the
adaptation is evaluated on a 28 hours corpus composed of documentaries and monolingual as well as multilingual broadcast
news shows. Consistent improvements in the automatic identification
of Flemish (Belgian Dutch), English and French are demonstrated for all broadcast types
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