IITG-HingCoS corpus: A Hinglish code-switching database for automatic speech recognition

Exploration of End-to-End Framework for Code-Switching Speech Recognition Task: Challenges and Enhancements

“…According to [7], [20], [44], unlike the monolingual case, the salient challenges posed by the code-switching phenomenon are (i) influence of native language on the pronunciation of nonnative language words within an utterance, (ii) requirement of expert linguistic knowledge and dedicated tools to handle the involved languages and (iii) lack of publicly available domain-specific resources. For augmenting resources in the Indian context, we recently created the HingCoS corpus [28] containing Hindi-English code-switching text and speech data. A few example sentences from the said corpus along with their respective English translations are given in Table 1.…”

“…Recently, in the context of the multilingual ASR task [45], the authors successfully used the union of phone sets of the underlying languages as targets to the E2E ASR system instead of the combined character set. Motivated by that, in an earlier work [28], we had defined a common phone set having 62 labels that cover both Hindi and English languages. In the same work, that phone set was also explored for developing a hybrid Hindi-English code-switching ASR system.…”

“…And those which could not be mapped to Hindi phones were given unique labels. For more details about that mapping, the readers are referred to Table 4 in [28]. In this work, we employ that common phone set along with the special character '_' as the reduced target set in training the attention-based E2E ASR system for the Hindi-English code-switching task.…”

“…In the context of low resourced modeling, one can avoid such a confusability if a common phone set covering the underlying languages in code-switching data is used as the output target. In an earlier work [28], we have proposed a common phone set towards building a hybrid ASR system for the Hindi-English code-switching task. Motivated by the above-cited reasons, we first explore the earlier defined common phone set as a reduced target set for developing an attention-based E2E Hindi-English code-switching ASR system using the HingCoS corpus [28].…”

“…In an earlier work [28], we have proposed a common phone set towards building a hybrid ASR system for the Hindi-English code-switching task. Motivated by the above-cited reasons, we first explore the earlier defined common phone set as a reduced target set for developing an attention-based E2E Hindi-English code-switching ASR system using the HingCoS corpus [28]. Interestingly, the reduced target set based E2E ASR system outperformed the combined target set one in terms of the target error rate (TER).…”