Using Resources from a Closely-related Language to Develop ASR for a Very Under-resourced Language: A Case Study for Iban

Juan, Sarah Samson and Besacier, Laurent and Lecouteux, Benjamin and Dyab, Mohamed (2015) Using Resources from a Closely-related Language to Develop ASR for a Very Under-resourced Language: A Case Study for Iban. In: Proceedings of INTERSPEECH 2015, September 2015, Dresden, Germany.

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Abstract

This paper presents our strategies for developing an automatic speech recognition system for Iban, an under-resourced language. We faced several challenges such as no pronunciation dictionary and lack of training material for building acoustic models. To overcome these problems, we proposed approaches which exploit resources from a closely-related language (Malay). We developed a semi-supervised method for building the pronunciation dictionary and applied cross-lingual strategies for improving acoustic models trained with very limited training data. Both approaches displayed very encouraging results, which show that data from a closely-related language, if available, can be exploited to build ASR for a new language. In the final part of the paper, we present a zero-shot ASR using Malay resources that can be used as an alternative method for transcribing Iban speech.

Item Type: Proceeding (Paper)
Uncontrolled Keywords: speech recognition, low resource languages, cross-lingual training, zero-shot ASR, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, unimas, university, universiti, Borneo, Malaysia, Sarawak, Kuching, Samarahan, ipta, education
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Divisions: Academic Faculties, Institutes and Centres > Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology
Faculties, Institutes, Centres > Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology
Academic Faculties, Institutes and Centres > Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology
Depositing User: Samson Juan
Date Deposited: 16 Oct 2015 01:23
Last Modified: 16 Oct 2015 01:23
URI: http://ir.unimas.my/id/eprint/8883

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