A first speech recognition system for Mandarin-English code-switch conversational speech

Ngoc Thang Vu, Dau-Cheng Lyu, Jochen Weiner, Dominic Telaar, Tim Schlippe, Fabian Blaicher, Eng-Siong Chng, Tanja Schultz, Haizhou Li
2012 2012 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP)  
This paper presents first steps toward a large vocabulary continuous speech recognition system (LVCSR) for conversational Mandarin-English code-switching (CS) speech. We applied state-of-the-art techniques such as speaker adaptive and discriminative training to build the first baseline system on the SEAME corpus [1] (South East Asia Mandarin-English). For acoustic modeling, we applied different phone merging approaches based on the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and Bhattacharyya
more » ... in combination with discriminative training to improve accuracy. On language model level, we investigated statistical machine translation (SMT)based text generation approaches for building code-switching language models. Furthermore, we integrated the provided information from a language identification system (LID) into the decoding process by using a multi-stream approach. Our best 2-pass system achieves a Mixed Error Rate (MER) of 36.6% on the SEAME development set.
doi:10.1109/icassp.2012.6289015 dblp:conf/icassp/VuLWTSBCSL12 fatcat:ht2gbea74rbqrhfaie6kpocxzi