First investigation and experiments in Welsh speech recognition
The work described in this thesis aims to efficiently develop automatic speech recognition (ASR) in languages for which no such technology currently exists. The focus is on minority languages such as Welsh. An overview of the challenges of ASR development in lesser-spoken languages is presented. The specification of a 2000-speaker database for Welsh is described, with special reference to a novel lexicon searching process for Celtic minority languages. The collection of this database is also detailed, along with an analysis of the pitfalls facing those collecting minority language speech resources for ASR, and ways to overcome them. ASR is carried out on a small subset of the Welsh database (no more than 350 male speakers uttering one isolated digit each). This simulates a worst-case scenario for a language having only limited funds for a database collection. It is found that for Welsh, together with English and German, no more than 100-125 training speakers are required to reach a point beyond which the improvement in recognition performance is logarithmic. To reduce the number of training speakers beyond which this logarithmic improvement occurs, a model combination method similar to Yoshizawa et al.'s (Eurospeech
Jones, R. J.
First investigation and experiments in Welsh speech recognition. The work described in this thesis aims to efficiently develop automatic speech recognition (ASR) in languages for which no such technology currently exists. The focus is on minority languages such as Welsh. An overview of the challenges of ASR development in lesser-spoken languages is presented. The specification of a 2000-speaker database for Welsh is described, with special reference to a novel lexicon searching process for Celtic minority languages. The collection of this database is also detailed, along with an analysis of the pitfalls facing those collecting minority language speech resources for ASR, and ways to overcome them. ASR is carried out on a small subset of the Welsh database (no more than 350 male speakers uttering one isolated digit each). This simulates a worst-case scenario for a language having only limited funds for a database collection. It is found that for Welsh, together with English and German, no more than 100-125 training speakers are required to reach a point beyond which the improvement in recognition performance is logarithmic. To reduce the number of training speakers beyond which this logarithmic improvement occurs, a model combination method similar to Yoshizawa et al.'s (Eurospeech
first investigation welsh speech_recognition work describe aim efficiently develop automatic_speech recognition asr languages technology currently exist focus minority_languages welsh overview asr development lesser spoken_language present specification speaker database welsh describe special_reference novel lexicon search process celtic minority_language collection database also detail along analysis pitfall face collect minority_language speech resource asr way overcome them asr carry small subset welsh database male speaker utter isolated case scenario language limit fund database collection find welsh together english_german training speaker require reach point beyond improvement recognition performance reduce number training speaker beyond improvement occurs model combination method similar