@inproceedings{kawahara-matsuura-2026-speech,
    title = "Speech Recognition and Synthesis Technologies Applied to Preservation and Revitalization of the {A}inu Language",
    author = "Kawahara, Tatsuya  and
      Matsuura, Kohei",
    editor = "Agyapong, Godfred  and
      Moeller, Sarah  and
      Arppe, Antti  and
      Marashian, Ali  and
      Rosenblum, Daisy",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on the Use of Computational Methods in the Study of Endangered Languages ({C}omput{EL}-9)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.computel-1.2/",
    pages = "10--14",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-422-4",
    abstract = "This paper gives an overview of our activities in developing automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) systems for the preservation and revitalization of the Ainu language, once spoken in the Hokkaido area of Japan, and listed as ``severely endangered'' of extinction. With a large pretrained model, a high-performing ASR system can be trained even with five hours of speech from a few speakers. It has been used to streamline the transcription and archiving of old recordings. A TTS system is also developed and used for revitalizing the speech of old folktales whose audio is missing. It is also used to provide a reference for speaking practice for new Ainu speakers. Speech technologies are important for endangered languages because their cultures have typically been passed down orally, and our efforts will be useful for passing them on to the future."
}