Related papers: Multilingual Bottleneck Features for Improving ASR…
How can we effectively develop speech technology for languages where no transcribed data is available? Many existing approaches use no annotated resources at all, yet it makes sense to leverage information from large annotated corpora in…
This paper presents recent progress in the acoustic modelling of under-resourced code-switched (CS) speech in multiple South African languages. We consider two approaches. The first constructs separate bilingual acoustic models…
This research addresses the problem of acoustic modeling of low-resource languages for which transcribed training data is absent. The goal is to learn robust frame-level feature representations that can be used to identify and distinguish…
We compare features for dynamic time warping (DTW) when used to bootstrap keyword spotting (KWS) in an almost zero-resource setting. Such quickly-deployable systems aim to support United Nations (UN) humanitarian relief efforts in parts of…
This paper reports on the semi-supervised development of acoustic and language models for under-resourced, code-switched speech in five South African languages. Two approaches are considered. The first constructs four separate bilingual…
Non-parallel data voice conversion (VC) have achieved considerable breakthroughs recently through introducing bottleneck features (BNFs) extracted by the automatic speech recognition(ASR) model. However, selection of BNFs have a significant…
We consider feature learning for efficient keyword spotting that can be applied in severely under-resourced settings. The objective is to support humanitarian relief programmes by the United Nations in parts of Africa in which almost no…
Low resource automatic speech recognition (ASR) is a useful but thorny task, since deep learning ASR models usually need huge amounts of training data. The existing models mostly established a bottleneck (BN) layer by pre-training on a…
We consider multilingual bottleneck features (BNFs) for nearly zero-resource keyword spotting. This forms part of a United Nations effort using keyword spotting to support humanitarian relief programmes in parts of Africa where languages…
While many speakers of low-resource languages regularly code-switch between their languages and other regional languages or English, datasets of codeswitched speech are too small to train bespoke acoustic models from scratch or do language…
Recently, there has been significant progress made in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) of code-switched speech, leading to gains in accuracy on code-switched datasets in many language pairs. Code-switched speech co-occurs with monolingual…
Recently, large pre-trained multilingual speech models have shown potential in scaling Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to many low-resource languages. Some of these models employ language adapters in their formulation, which helps to…
As for the humanoid robots, the internal noise, which is generated by motors, fans and mechanical components when the robot is moving or shaking its body, severely degrades the performance of the speech recognition accuracy. In this paper,…
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has reached impressive accuracy for high-resource languages, yet its utility in linguistic fieldwork remains limited. Recordings collected in fieldwork contexts present unique challenges, including…
Techniques for multi-lingual and cross-lingual speech recognition can help in low resource scenarios, to bootstrap systems and enable analysis of new languages and domains. End-to-end approaches, in particular sequence-based techniques, are…
We present an analysis of semi-supervised acoustic and language model training for English-isiZulu code-switched ASR using soap opera speech. Approximately 11 hours of untranscribed multilingual speech was transcribed automatically using…
Low power digital signal processors (DSPs) typically have a very limited amount of memory in which to cache data. In this paper we develop efficient bottleneck feature (BNF) extractors that can be run on a DSP, and retrain a baseline…
This study addresses unsupervised subword modeling, i.e., learning feature representations that can distinguish subword units of a language. The proposed approach adopts a two-stage bottleneck feature (BNF) learning framework, consisting of…
We present first speech recognition systems for the two severely under-resourced Malian languages Bambara and Maasina Fulfulde. These systems will be used by the United Nations as part of a monitoring system to inform and support…
Languages usually switch within a multilingual speech signal, especially in a bilingual society. This phenomenon is referred to as code-switching (CS), making automatic speech recognition (ASR) challenging under a multilingual scenario. We…