Using Automatic Speech Recognition in Spoken Corpus Curation

Jan Gorisch, Michael Gref, Thomas Schmidt


Abstract
The newest generation of speech technology caused a huge increase of audio-visual data nowadays being enhanced with orthographic transcripts such as in automatic subtitling in online platforms. Research data centers and archives contain a range of new and historical data, which are currently only partially transcribed and therefore only partially accessible for systematic querying. Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is one option of making that data accessible. This paper tests the usability of a state-of-the-art ASR-System on a historical (from the 1960s), but regionally balanced corpus of spoken German, and a relatively new corpus (from 2012) recorded in a narrow area. We observed a regional bias of the ASR-System with higher recognition scores for the north of Germany vs. lower scores for the south. A detailed analysis of the narrow region data revealed – despite relatively high ASR-confidence – some specific word errors due to a lack of regional adaptation. These findings need to be considered in decisions on further data processing and the curation of corpora, e.g. correcting transcripts or transcribing from scratch. Such geography-dependent analyses can also have the potential for ASR-development to make targeted data selection for training/adaptation and to increase the sensitivity towards varieties of pluricentric languages.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.790
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6423–6428
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.790
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jan Gorisch, Michael Gref, and Thomas Schmidt. 2020. Using Automatic Speech Recognition in Spoken Corpus Curation. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6423–6428, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Using Automatic Speech Recognition in Spoken Corpus Curation (Gorisch et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.790.pdf