Transfer Learning Based Free-Form Speech Command Classification for Low-Resource Languages
Yohan Karunanayake, Uthayasanker Thayasivam, Surangika Ranathunga · 2019
Current state-of-the-art speech-based user interfaces use data intense methodologies to recognize free-form speech commands.However, this is not viable for low-resource languages, which lack speech data.This restricts the usability of such interfaces to a limited number of languages.In this paper, we propose a methodology to develop a robust domainspecific speech command classification system for low-resource languages using speech data of a high-resource language.In this transfer learning-based approach, we used a Convolution Neural Network (CNN) to identify a fixed set of intents using an ASR-based character probability map.We were able to achieve significant results for Sinhala and Tamil datasets using an English based ASR, which attests the robustness of the proposed approach..