Cross-language mapping for small-vocabulary ASR in under-resourced languages: investigating the impact of source language choice.
Anjana Sofia Vakil, Alexis Palmer · 2014
For small-vocabulary applications, a mapped pronuncia-tion lexicon can enable speech recognition in a target under-resourced language using an out-of-the-box recognition en-gine for a high-resource source language. Existing algorithms for cross-language phoneme mapping enable the fully auto-matic creation of such lexicons using just a few minutes of au-dio, making speech-driven applications in any language feasi-ble. What such methods have not considered is whether care-ful selection of the source language based on the linguistic properties of the target language can improve recognition ac-curacy; this paper reports on a preliminary exploration of this question. Results from a first case study seem to indicate that phonetic similarity between target and source language does not significantly impact accuracy, underscoring the language-independence of such techniques. Index Terms — under-resourced languages, speech recog-nition, lexicon building, phoneme mapping 1.