Cross-language phone recognition when the target language phoneme inventory is not known
Timothy Kempton, Roger K. Moore, Thomas Hain · 2011
Cross-language speech recognition often assumes a certain amount of knowledge about the target language. However, there are hundreds of languages where not even the phoneme inven-tory is known. In the work reported here, phone recognisers are evaluated on a cross-language task with minimum target knowl-edge. A phonetic distance measure is introduced for the evalua-tion, allowing a distance to be calculated between any utterance of any language. This has a number of spin-off applications such as allophone detection, a phone-based ROVER approach to recognition, and cross-language forced alignment. Results show that some of these novel approaches will be of immediate use in characterising languages where there is little phonological knowledge. Index Terms: universal phone recognition, cross-language speech recognition, forced alignment, under-resourced lan-guages 1.