English

A case study on using speech-to-translation alignments for language documentation

Computation and Language 2017-02-16 v1

Abstract

For many low-resource or endangered languages, spoken language resources are more likely to be annotated with translations than with transcriptions. Recent work exploits such annotations to produce speech-to-translation alignments, without access to any text transcriptions. We investigate whether providing such information can aid in producing better (mismatched) crowdsourced transcriptions, which in turn could be valuable for training speech recognition systems, and show that they can indeed be beneficial through a small-scale case study as a proof-of-concept. We also present a simple phonetically aware string averaging technique that produces transcriptions of higher quality.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1702.04372,
  title  = {A case study on using speech-to-translation alignments for language documentation},
  author = {Antonios Anastasopoulos and David Chiang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.04372},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

to be presented at ComputEL-2

R2 v1 2026-06-22T18:18:30.352Z