Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has evolved from a pipeline architecture with pronunciation dictionaries, phonetic features and language models to the end-to-end systems performing a direct translation from a raw waveform into a word sequence. With the increase in accuracy and the availability of pre-trained models, the ASR systems are now omnipresent in our daily applications. On the other hand, the models’ interpretability and their computational cost have become more challenging, particularly when dealing with less-common languages or identifying regional variations of speakers. This research proposal will follow a four-stage process: 1) Proving an overview of acoustic features and feature extraction algorithms; 2) Exploring current ASR models, tools, and performance assessment techniques; 3) Aligning features with interpretable phonetic transcripts; and 4) Designing a prototype ARPOCA to increase awareness of regional language variation and improve models feedback by developing a semi-automatic acoustic features extraction using PRAAT in conjunction with phonetic transcription.

It is well known that word aligned parallel corpora are valuable linguistic resources. Since many factors affect automatic alignment quality, manual post-editing may be required in some applications. While there are several state-of-the-art word-aligners, such as GIZA++ and Berkeley, there is no simple visual tool that would enable correcting and editing aligned corpora of different formats. We have developed SWIFT Aligner, a free, portable software that allows for visual representation and editing of aligned corpora from several most commonly used formats: TALP, GIZA, and NAACL. In addition, our tool has incorporated part-of-speech and syntactic dependency transfer from an annotated source language into an unannotated target language, by means of word-alignment.