@inproceedings{bleaman-2026-automatic,
    title = "Automatic Transcription of Holocaust Testimonies in {Y}iddish: Orthographic Comparison and Cross-Domain Validation",
    author = "Bleaman, Isaac L.",
    editor = "Anuradha, Isuri  and
      Wynne, Martin",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of The Second Workshop on Holocaust Testimonies as Language Resources ({HTR}es)",
    month = may,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Palma, Mallorca (Spain)",
    publisher = "ELRA Language Resources Association (ELRA)",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/revision-previews/2026.htres-2.3/",
    doi = "10.63317/24nawizn9q4x",
    pages = "20--28",
    abstract = "The digitization and computational processing of Holocaust testimony interviews are essential for the long-term preservation and accessibility of survivors' narratives. However, automatic speech recognition (ASR) for Yiddish{---}the primary language of most Holocaust victims and survivors{---}remains underdeveloped. This paper introduces the first ASR system for European Yiddish, focused on the Northeastern ({``}Lithuanian'') dialect and trained on Holocaust survivor testimonies from the Corpus of Spoken Yiddish in Europe (42 hours of speech segments from 60 survivors). A systematic comparison of CTC-based ASR models using transcripts with different orthographic representations reveals that a Hebrew-based phonemic system with precomposed Unicode is optimal, achieving a mean WER of 37.96{\%} compared to 59.40{\%} WER for romanized Yiddish and 99.67{\%} WER (catastrophic failure) for standard Yiddish spelled with decomposed Unicode. Cross-domain testing on Yiddish audiobooks provides additional support for a phonemic representation (27.07{\%} WER, 6.56{\%} CER). Together, the results suggest that automatic transcription developed from oral Holocaust testimonies can support further technological innovation in service of Yiddish-speaking communities."
}