Basque: the language and its speakers

Igartua, Iván; Oñederra, Miren Lourdes

doi:10.1515/lme.9998081

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Basque is an isolate non-Indo-European language spoken by around 900 thousand people in a small region of Western Europe around the Biscay Bay, divided between Spain and France [30,31]. A sizeable amount of Basque words have been borrowed from Latin, later from Romance languages (Spanish and French) and in the last decades from English, but most of the vocabulary is genuine and not related to other languages.…”

Section: Basque and Spanish: A Brief Comparisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Bilingual Basque–Spanish Dataset of Parliamentary Sessions for the Development and Evaluation of Speech Technology

Varona,

Penagarikano,

Bordel

et al. 2024

Applied Sciences

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The development of speech technology requires large amounts of data to estimate the underlying models. Even when relying on large multilingual pre-trained models, some amount of task-specific data on the target language is needed to fine-tune those models and obtain competitive performance. In this paper, we present a bilingual Basque–Spanish dataset extracted from parliamentary sessions. The dataset is designed to develop and evaluate automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems but can be easily repurposed for other speech-processing tasks (such as speaker or language recognition). The paper first compares the two target languages, emphasizing their similarities at the acoustic-phonetic level, which sets the basis for sharing data and compensating for the relatively small amount of spoken resources available for Basque. Then, Basque Parliament plenary sessions are characterized in terms of organization, topics, speaker turns and the use of the two languages. The paper continues with the description of the data collection procedure (involving both speech and text), the audio formats and conversions along with the creation and postprocessing of text transcriptions and session minutes. Then, it describes the semi-supervised iterative procedure used to cut, rank and select the training segments and the manual supervision process employed to produce the test set. Finally, ASR experiments are presented using state-of-the-art technology to validate the dataset and to set a reference for future works. The datasets, along with models and recipes to reproduce the experiments reported in the paper, are released through Hugging Face.

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Section: Basque and Spanish: A Brief Comparisonmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Bilingual Basque–Spanish Dataset of Parliamentary Sessions for the Development and Evaluation of Speech Technology

Varona,

Penagarikano,

Bordel

et al. 2024

Applied Sciences

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“…In this work, we deal with Basque and Spanish (the two official languages in the Basque Country). Basque is a language of unknown origins, spoken by around 900 thousand speakers in a small region of Spain and France [13,14]. Basque greatly differs from Spanish, especially at the lexical and syntactic levels.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In declarative sentences, the most common order in Spanish is subject-verb-object while in Basque it is subject-object-verb. However, on a phonetic level, Basque shares many of its sounds with Spanish (including its five vowels), with only some consonants, such as /ts/, /ts'/, /s'/ and some other less frequent ones (see Table 1) not appearing in Spanish [15].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Semisupervised Speech Data Extraction from Basque Parliament Sessions and Validation on Fully Bilingual Basque–Spanish ASR

et al. 2023

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In this paper, a semisupervised speech data extraction method is presented and applied to create a new dataset designed for the development of fully bilingual Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems for Basque and Spanish. The dataset is drawn from an extensive collection of Basque Parliament plenary sessions containing frequent code switchings. Since session minutes are not exact, only the most reliable speech segments are kept for training. To that end, we use phonetic similarity scores between nominal and recognized phone sequences. The process starts with baseline acoustic models trained on generic out-of-domain data, then iteratively updates the models with the extracted data and applies the updated models to refine the training dataset until the observed improvement between two iterations becomes small enough. A development dataset, involving five plenary sessions not used for training, has been manually audited for tuning and evaluation purposes. Cross-validation experiments (with 20 random partitions) have been carried out on the development dataset, using the baseline and the iteratively updated models. On average, Word Error Rate (WER) reduces from 16.57% (baseline) to 4.41% (first iteration) and further to 4.02% (second iteration), which corresponds to relative WER reductions of 73.4% and 8.8%, respectively. When considering only Basque segments, WER reduces on average from 16.57% (baseline) to 5.51% (first iteration) and further to 5.13% (second iteration), which corresponds to relative WER reductions of 66.7% and 6.9%, respectively. As a result of this work, a new bilingual Basque–Spanish resource has been produced based on Basque Parliament sessions, including 998 h of training data (audio segments + transcriptions), a development set (17 h long) designed for tuning and evaluation under a cross-validation scheme and a fully bilingual trigram language model.

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Basque: the language and its speakers

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

A Bilingual Basque–Spanish Dataset of Parliamentary Sessions for the Development and Evaluation of Speech Technology

A Bilingual Basque–Spanish Dataset of Parliamentary Sessions for the Development and Evaluation of Speech Technology

Semisupervised Speech Data Extraction from Basque Parliament Sessions and Validation on Fully Bilingual Basque–Spanish ASR

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