Unicode-based graphemic systems for limited resource languages

© 2015 IEEE. Large vocabulary continuous speech recognition systems require a mapping from words, or tokens, into sub-word units to enable robust estimation of acoustic model parameters, and to model words not seen in the training data. The standard approach to achieve this is to manually generate a lexicon where words are mapped into phones, often with attributes associated with each of these phones. Contextdependent acoustic models are then constructed using decision trees where questions are asked based on the phones and phone attributes. For low-resource languages, it may not be practical to manually generate a lexicon. An alternative approach is to use a graphemic lexicon, where the 'pronunciation' for a word is defined by the letters forming that word. This paper proposes a simple approach for building graphemic systems for any language written in unicode. The attributes for graphemes are automatically derived using features from the unicode character descriptions. These attributes are then used in decision tree construction. This approach is examined on the IARPA Babel Option Period 2 languages, and a Levantine Arabic CTS task. The described approach achieves comparable, and complementary, performance to phonetic lexicon-based approaches

Low-resource speech recognition and keyword-spotting

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017. The IARPA Babel program ran from March 2012 to November 2016. The aim of the program was to develop agile and robust speech technology that can be rapidly applied to any human language in order to provide effective search capability on large quantities of real world data. This paper will describe some of the developments in speech recognition and keyword-spotting during the lifetime of the project. Two technical areas will be briefly discussed with a focus on techniques developed at Cambridge University: the application of deep learning for low-resource speech recognition; and efficient approaches for keyword spotting. Finally a brief analysis of the Babel speech language characteristics and language performance will be presented

Towards Language-Universal End-to-End Speech Recognition

Building speech recognizers in multiple languages typically involves replicating a monolingual training recipe for each language, or utilizing a multi-task learning approach where models for different languages have separate output labels but share some internal parameters. In this work, we exploit recent progress in end-to-end speech recognition to create a single multilingual speech recognition system capable of recognizing any of the languages seen in training. To do so, we propose the use of a universal character set that is shared among all languages. We also create a language-specific gating mechanism within the network that can modulate the network's internal representations in a language-specific way. We evaluate our proposed approach on the Microsoft Cortana task across three languages and show that our system outperforms both the individual monolingual systems and systems built with a multi-task learning approach. We also show that this model can be used to initialize a monolingual speech recognizer, and can be used to create a bilingual model for use in code-switching scenarios.Comment: submitted to ICASSP 201

The Unicode cookbook for linguists: Managing writing systems using orthography profiles

This text is a practical guide for linguists, and programmers, who work with data in multilingual computational environments. We introduce the basic concepts needed to understand how writing systems and character encodings function, and how they work together at the intersection between the Unicode Standard and the International Phonetic Alphabet. Although these standards are often met with frustration by users, they nevertheless provide language researchers and programmers with a consistent computational architecture needed to process, publish and analyze lexical data from the world's languages. Thus we bring to light common, but not always transparent, pitfalls which researchers face when working with Unicode and IPA. Having identified and overcome these pitfalls involved in making writing systems and character encodings syntactically and semantically interoperable (to the extent that they can be), we created a suite of open-source Python and R tools to work with languages using orthography profiles that describe author- or document-specific orthographic conventions. In this cookbook we describe a formal specification of orthography profiles and provide recipes using open source tools to show how users can segment text, analyze it, identify errors, and to transform it into different written forms for comparative linguistics research. This book is a prime example of open publishing as envisioned by Language Science Press. It is open access, has accompanying open source software, has open peer review, versioning and so on. Read more in this blog post. The book is continuously being improved. You can follow the development on https://github.com/unicode-cookbook/cookbook/releases/latest   &nbsp

The Unicode cookbook for linguists: Managing writing systems using orthography profiles

This text is a practical guide for linguists, and programmers, who work with data in multilingual computational environments. We introduce the basic concepts needed to understand how writing systems and character encodings function, and how they work together at the intersection between the Unicode Standard and the International Phonetic Alphabet. Although these standards are often met with frustration by users, they nevertheless provide language researchers and programmers with a consistent computational architecture needed to process, publish and analyze lexical data from the world's languages. Thus we bring to light common, but not always transparent, pitfalls which researchers face when working with Unicode and IPA. Having identified and overcome these pitfalls involved in making writing systems and character encodings syntactically and semantically interoperable (to the extent that they can be), we created a suite of open-source Python and R tools to work with languages using orthography profiles that describe author- or document-specific orthographic conventions. In this cookbook we describe a formal specification of orthography profiles and provide recipes using open source tools to show how users can segment text, analyze it, identify errors, and to transform it into different written forms for comparative linguistics research. This book is a prime example of open publishing as envisioned by Language Science Press. It is open access, has accompanying open source software, has open peer review, versioning and so on. Read more in this blog post. The book is continuously being improved. You can follow the development on https://github.com/unicode-cookbook/cookbook/releases/latest   &nbsp

The Unicode cookbook for linguists: Managing writing systems using orthography profiles

This text is a practical guide for linguists, and programmers, who work with data in multilingual computational environments. We introduce the basic concepts needed to understand how writing systems and character encodings function, and how they work together at the intersection between the Unicode Standard and the International Phonetic Alphabet. Although these standards are often met with frustration by users, they nevertheless provide language researchers and programmers with a consistent computational architecture needed to process, publish and analyze lexical data from the world's languages. Thus we bring to light common, but not always transparent, pitfalls which researchers face when working with Unicode and IPA. Having identified and overcome these pitfalls involved in making writing systems and character encodings syntactically and semantically interoperable (to the extent that they can be), we created a suite of open-source Python and R tools to work with languages using orthography profiles that describe author- or document-specific orthographic conventions. In this cookbook we describe a formal specification of orthography profiles and provide recipes using open source tools to show how users can segment text, analyze it, identify errors, and to transform it into different written forms for comparative linguistics research. This book is a prime example of open publishing as envisioned by Language Science Press. It is open access, has accompanying open source software, has open peer review, versioning and so on. Read more in this blog post. The book is continuously being improved. You can follow the development on https://github.com/unicode-cookbook/cookbook/releases/latest   &nbsp

The Unicode cookbook for linguists: Managing writing systems using orthography profiles

This text is a practical guide for linguists, and programmers, who work with data in multilingual computational environments. We introduce the basic concepts needed to understand how writing systems and character encodings function, and how they work together at the intersection between the Unicode Standard and the International Phonetic Alphabet. Although these standards are often met with frustration by users, they nevertheless provide language researchers and programmers with a consistent computational architecture needed to process, publish and analyze lexical data from the world's languages. Thus we bring to light common, but not always transparent, pitfalls which researchers face when working with Unicode and IPA. Having identified and overcome these pitfalls involved in making writing systems and character encodings syntactically and semantically interoperable (to the extent that they can be), we created a suite of open-source Python and R tools to work with languages using orthography profiles that describe author- or document-specific orthographic conventions. In this cookbook we describe a formal specification of orthography profiles and provide recipes using open source tools to show how users can segment text, analyze it, identify errors, and to transform it into different written forms for comparative linguistics research. This book is a prime example of open publishing as envisioned by Language Science Press. It is open access, has accompanying open source software, has open peer review, versioning and so on. Read more in this blog post. The book is continuously being improved. You can follow the development on https://github.com/unicode-cookbook/cookbook/releases/latest   &nbsp

The Unicode cookbook for linguists: Managing writing systems using orthography profiles

This text is a practical guide for linguists, and programmers, who work with data in multilingual computational environments. We introduce the basic concepts needed to understand how writing systems and character encodings function, and how they work together at the intersection between the Unicode Standard and the International Phonetic Alphabet. Although these standards are often met with frustration by users, they nevertheless provide language researchers and programmers with a consistent computational architecture needed to process, publish and analyze lexical data from the world's languages. Thus we bring to light common, but not always transparent, pitfalls which researchers face when working with Unicode and IPA. Having identified and overcome these pitfalls involved in making writing systems and character encodings syntactically and semantically interoperable (to the extent that they can be), we created a suite of open-source Python and R tools to work with languages using orthography profiles that describe author- or document-specific orthographic conventions. In this cookbook we describe a formal specification of orthography profiles and provide recipes using open source tools to show how users can segment text, analyze it, identify errors, and to transform it into different written forms for comparative linguistics research. This book is a prime example of open publishing as envisioned by Language Science Press. It is open access, has accompanying open source software, has open peer review, versioning and so on. Read more in this blog post. The book is continuously being improved. You can follow the development on https://github.com/unicode-cookbook/cookbook/releases/latest   &nbsp

The Unicode cookbook for linguists: Managing writing systems using orthography profiles

This text is a practical guide for linguists, and programmers, who work with data in multilingual computational environments. We introduce the basic concepts needed to understand how writing systems and character encodings function, and how they work together at the intersection between the Unicode Standard and the International Phonetic Alphabet. Although these standards are often met with frustration by users, they nevertheless provide language researchers and programmers with a consistent computational architecture needed to process, publish and analyze lexical data from the world's languages. Thus we bring to light common, but not always transparent, pitfalls which researchers face when working with Unicode and IPA. Having identified and overcome these pitfalls involved in making writing systems and character encodings syntactically and semantically interoperable (to the extent that they can be), we created a suite of open-source Python and R tools to work with languages using orthography profiles that describe author- or document-specific orthographic conventions. In this cookbook we describe a formal specification of orthography profiles and provide recipes using open source tools to show how users can segment text, analyze it, identify errors, and to transform it into different written forms for comparative linguistics research. This book is a prime example of open publishing as envisioned by Language Science Press. It is open access, has accompanying open source software, has open peer review, versioning and so on. Read more in this blog post. The book is continuously being improved. You can follow the development on https://github.com/unicode-cookbook/cookbook/releases/latest   &nbsp

The Unicode cookbook for linguists: Managing writing systems using orthography profiles

This text is a practical guide for linguists, and programmers, who work with data in multilingual computational environments. We introduce the basic concepts needed to understand how writing systems and character encodings function, and how they work together at the intersection between the Unicode Standard and the International Phonetic Alphabet. Although these standards are often met with frustration by users, they nevertheless provide language researchers and programmers with a consistent computational architecture needed to process, publish and analyze lexical data from the world's languages. Thus we bring to light common, but not always transparent, pitfalls which researchers face when working with Unicode and IPA. Having identified and overcome these pitfalls involved in making writing systems and character encodings syntactically and semantically interoperable (to the extent that they can be), we created a suite of open-source Python and R tools to work with languages using orthography profiles that describe author- or document-specific orthographic conventions. In this cookbook we describe a formal specification of orthography profiles and provide recipes using open source tools to show how users can segment text, analyze it, identify errors, and to transform it into different written forms for comparative linguistics research. This book is a prime example of open publishing as envisioned by Language Science Press. It is open access, has accompanying open source software, has open peer review, versioning and so on. Read more in this blog post. The book is continuously being improved. You can follow the development on https://github.com/unicode-cookbook/cookbook/releases/latest   &nbsp