Turkish LVCSR: towards better speech recognition for agglutinative languages
K. Carki, Petra Geutner, Tanja Schultz · 2002
The Turkish language belongs to the Turkic family. All members of this family are close to one another in terms of linguistic structure. Typological similarities are vowel harmony, verb-final word order and agglutinative morphology. This latter property causes a very fast vocabulary growth resulting in a large number of out-of-vocabulary words. In this paper we describe our first experiments in a speaker independent LVCSR engine for Modern Standard Turkish. First results on our Turkish speech recognition system are presented. The currently best system shows very promising results achieving 16.9% word error rate. To overcome the OOV-problem we propose a morphem-based and the Hypothesis Driven Lexical Adaptation approach. The final Turkish system is integrated into the multilingual recognition engine of the GlobalPhone project.