Abstract
In this paper we describe an approach that both creates crosslingual acoustic monophone model sets for speech recognition tasks and objectively predicts their performance without target-language speech data or acoustic measurement techniques. This strategy is based on a series of linguistic metrics characterizing the articulatory phonetic and phonological distances of target-language phonemes from source-language phonemes. We term these algorithms the Combined Phonetic and Phonological Crosslingual Distance (CPP-CD) metric and the Combined Phonetic and Phonological Crosslingual Prediction (CPP-CP) metric. The particular motivations for this project are the current unavailability and often prohibitively high production cost of speech databases for many strategically important low- and middle-density languages. First, we describe the CPP-CD approach and compare the performance of CPP-CD-specified models to both native language models and crosslingual models selected by the Bhattacharyya acoustic-model distance metric in automatic speech recognition (ASR) experiments. Results confirm that the CPP-CD approach nearly matches those achieved by the acoustic distance metric. We then test the CPP-CP algorithm on the CPP-CD models by comparing the CPP-CP scores to the recognition phoneme error rates. Based on this comparison, we conclude that the CPP-CP algorithm is a reliable indicator of crosslingual model performance in speech recognition tasks.- Anthology ID:
- L08-1192
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2008
- Address:
- Marrakech, Morocco
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
- Note:
- Pages:
- Language:
- URL:
- http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/68_paper.pdf
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Lynette Melnar and Chen Liu. 2008. Borrowing Language Resources for Development of Automatic Speech Recognition for Low- and Middle-Density Languages. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
- Cite (Informal):
- Borrowing Language Resources for Development of Automatic Speech Recognition for Low- and Middle-Density Languages (Melnar & Liu, LREC 2008)
- PDF:
- http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/68_paper.pdf