@inproceedings{chirkova-etal-2025-comparing,
    title = "Comparing efficacy of {IPA} vs {P}inyin romanisation transcriptions for complex tonal languages: A case study in {B}aima",
    author = "Chirkova, Katia  and
      Coto-Solano, Rolando  and
      Griffiths, Rachael  and
      Meelen, Marieke",
    editor = "Lachler, Jordan  and
      Agyapong, Godfred  and
      Arppe, Antti  and
      Moeller, Sarah  and
      Chaudhary, Aditi  and
      Rijhwani, Shruti  and
      Rosenblum, Daisy",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Eight Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages",
    month = mar,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Honolulu, Hawaii, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/Ingest-2025-COMPUTEL/2025.computel-main.20/",
    pages = "170--181",
    ISBN = "None",
    abstract = "How is automated tone transcription affected by the choice of transcription orthography? In this paper we present a range of experiments that indicate that, even when the tonal repre- sentations are kept the same, the way vowels and consonants are transcribed can affect tonal character outputs. Our results also indicate that using a Language Model (LM) for decoding can mitigate problems with tonal outputs, but tones remain the most difficult part of the tran- scription. In doing this we also present the first Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for the Baima language, spoken in Sichuan and Gansu, China. We hope to use these models to contribute to ongoing documentation efforts."
}