Automatic Speech Recognition of English-isiZulu Code-switched Speech from South African Soap Operas

We introduce a new English-isiZulu code-switched speech corpus compiled from South African soap opera broadcasts. isiZulu itself is currently under-resourced, and automatic speech recognition is made even more challenging by the high prevalence of code-switching in spontaneous speech. Analysis of th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Procedia computer science 2016, Vol.81, p.121-127
Main Authors: van der Westhuizen, Ewald, Niesler, Thomas
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
code-switching
isiZulu
multilingual speech recognition
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Summary:We introduce a new English-isiZulu code-switched speech corpus compiled from South African soap opera broadcasts. isiZulu itself is currently under-resourced, and automatic speech recognition is made even more challenging by the high prevalence of code-switching in spontaneous speech. Analysis of the corpus reflects effects common in conversational isiZulu, such as vowel deletion and cross-language prefixes and suffixes. Baseline monolingual and code-switched automatic speech recognition systems are developed, including a new language model configuration that explicitly includes switching transitions. For code-switched speech, a system with language-dependent acoustic models and language-dependent language models linked by switching transitions leads to best performance, although word error rates overall remain very high.
ISSN:1877-0509
1877-0509
DOI:10.1016/j.procs.2016.04.039