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

Cross-Language Phone Recognition when the Target Language Phoneme Inventory is not Known

Timothy Kempton, Roger K. Moore, Thomas Hain

University of Sheffield, UK

Cross-language speech recognition often assumes a certain amount of knowledge about the target language. However, there are hundreds of languages where not even the phoneme inventory is known. In the work reported here, phone recognisers are evaluated on a cross-language task with minimum target knowledge. A phonetic distance measure is introduced for the evaluation, allowing a distance to be calculated between any utterance of any language. This has a number of spin-off applications such as allophone detection, a phone-based ROVER approach to recognition, and cross-language forced alignment. Results show that some of these novel approaches will be of immediate use in characterising languages where there is little phonological knowledge.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Kempton, Timothy / Moore, Roger K. / Hain, Thomas (2011): "Cross-language phone recognition when the target language phoneme inventory is not known", In INTERSPEECH-2011, 3165-3168.