This paper reports on progress integrating the speech recognition toolkit ESPnet into Elpis, a web front-end originally designed to provide access to the Kaldi automatic speech recognition toolkit. The goal of this work is to make end-to-end speech recognition models available to language workers via a user-friendly graphical interface. Encouraging results are reported on (i) development of an ESPnet recipe for use in Elpis, with preliminary results on data sets previously used for training acoustic models with the Persephone toolkit along with a new data set that had not previously been used in speech recognition, and (ii) incorporating ESPnet into Elpis along with UI enhancements and a CUDA-supported Dockerfile.
This is a report on results obtained in the development of speech recognition tools intended to support linguistic documentation efforts. The test case is an extensive fieldwork corpus of Japhug, an endangered language of the Trans-Himalayan (Sino-Tibetan) family. The goal is to reduce the transcription workload of field linguists. The method used is a deep learning approach based on the language-specific tuning of a generic pre-trained representation model, XLS-R, using a Transformer architecture. We note difficulties in implementation, in terms of learning stability. But this approach brings significant improvements nonetheless. The quality of phonemic transcription is improved over earlier experiments; and most significantly, the new approach allows for reaching the stage of automatic word recognition. Subjective evaluation of the tool by the author of the training data confirms the usefulness of this approach.
The LACITO multimedia archive [1] provides free access to documents of connected, spontaneous speech, mostly in "rare" or endangered languages, recorded in their cultural context and transcribed in consultation with native speakers. Its goal is to contribute to the documentation and study of a precious human heritage: the world's languages. It has a special strength in languages of Asia and the Pacific. The LACITO archive was built with little personnel and less funding. It has been devised, developed and maintained over two decades by two researchers assisted by one engineer. Its simple architecture is based on current standards: Unicode character coding and XML markup; and Dublin Core/Open Language Archives Community recommendations for metadata. The data can be consulted online with any standard browser. The technical simplicity of the tools developed at LACITO makes them suitable for the creation of similar databases at other institutions.
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