Lithuanian Speech Recognition Using the English Recognizer

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Kasparaitis, Pijus

Affiliations: Department of Computer Science II, Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Vilnius University, Naugarduko 24, 03225 Vilnius, Lithuania, e-mail: [email protected]

Abstract: The present work is concerned with speech recognition using a small or medium size vocabulary. The possibility to use the English speech recognizer for the recognition of Lithuanian was investigated. Two methods were used to deal with such problems: the expert-driven (knowledge-based) method and the data-driven one. Phonological systems of English and Lithuanian were compared on the basis of the knowledge of phonology, and relations between certain Lithuanian and English phonemes were established. Situations in which correspondences between the phonemes were to be established experimentally (i.e., using the data-driven method) and the English phonemes that best matched the Lithuanian sounds or their combinations (e.g., diphthongs) in such situations were identified. The results obtained were used for creating transcriptions of the Lithuanian names and surnames that were used in recognition experiments. The experiments without transcriptions, with a single transcription and with many transcriptions were carried on. The method that allowed finding a small number of best transcriptions was proposed. The recognition rate achieved was as follows: 84.2% with the vocabulary containing 500 word pairs.

Keywords: speech recognition, small and medium size vocabulary, expert-driven approach, data-driven approach

Journal: Informatica, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 505-516, 2008