Borrowing Language Resources for Development of Automatic Speech Recognition for Low- and Middle-Density Languages

Lynette Melnar, 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.
Anthology ID:
L08-1192
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
Month:
May
Year:
2008
Address:
Marrakech, Morocco
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/68_paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Lynette Melnar and Chen Liu. 2008. Borrowing Language Resources for Development of Automatic Speech Recognition for Low- and Middle-Density Languages. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Borrowing Language Resources for Development of Automatic Speech Recognition for Low- and Middle-Density Languages (Melnar & Liu, LREC 2008)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/68_paper.pdf