Automatic Speech Recognition Datasets in Cantonese: A Survey and New Dataset

Tiezheng Yu, Rita Frieske, Peng Xu, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Cheuk Tung Yiu, Holy Lovenia, Wenliang Dai, Elham J. Barezi, Qifeng Chen, Xiaojuan Ma, Bertram Shi, Pascale Fung

Abstract
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) on low resource languages improves the access of linguistic minorities to technological advantages provided by artificial intelligence (AI). In this paper, we address the problem of data scarcity for the Hong Kong Cantonese language by creating a new Cantonese dataset. Our dataset, Multi-Domain Cantonese Corpus (MDCC), consists of 73.6 hours of clean read speech paired with transcripts, collected from Cantonese audiobooks from Hong Kong. It comprises philosophy, politics, education, culture, lifestyle and family domains, covering a wide range of topics. We also review all existing Cantonese datasets and analyze them according to their speech type, data source, total size and availability. We further conduct experiments with Fairseq S2T Transformer, a state-of-the-art ASR model, on the biggest existing dataset, Common Voice zh-HK, and our proposed MDCC, and the results show the effectiveness of our dataset. In addition, we create a powerful and robust Cantonese ASR model by applying multi-dataset learning on MDCC and Common Voice zh-HK.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.696
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6487–6494
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.696
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tiezheng Yu, Rita Frieske, Peng Xu, Samuel Cahyawijaya, Cheuk Tung Yiu, Holy Lovenia, Wenliang Dai, Elham J. Barezi, Qifeng Chen, Xiaojuan Ma, Bertram Shi, and Pascale Fung. 2022. Automatic Speech Recognition Datasets in Cantonese: A Survey and New Dataset. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6487–6494, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Automatic Speech Recognition Datasets in Cantonese: A Survey and New Dataset (Yu et al., LREC 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2022.lrec-1.696.pdf
Code
 hltchkust/cantonese-asr
Data
Common Voice, LibriSpeech
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