INTERSPEECH 2011 12th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association Florence, Italy August 27-31. 2011

Cheap Bootstrap of Multi-Lingual Hidden Markov Models

Daniele Falavigna, Roberto Gretter

FBK-irst, Italy

In this work we investigate the usage of TV audio data for crosslanguage training of multi-lingual acoustic models. We intend to take advantage from the availability of a training speech corpus formed by parallel news uttered in different languages and transmitted over separated audio channels.

Spanish, French and Russian phone Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are bootstrapped using an unsupervised training procedure starting from an Italian set of phone HMMs. The use of confidence measures in order to select the training audio data was also investigated and has proved to be effective. The usage of cross language information, i.e. exploiting the temporal alignment of news in different languages to build news-dependent Language Models (LMs), was also demonstrated to give benefits to the acoustic model training.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Falavigna, Daniele / Gretter, Roberto (2011): "Cheap bootstrap of multi-lingual hidden Markov models", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 2325-2328.