Phonemic Transcription of Low-Resource Languages: To What Extent can Preprocessing be Automated?

Guillaume Wisniewski, Séverine Guillaume, Alexis Michaud


Abstract
Automatic Speech Recognition for low-resource languages has been an active field of research for more than a decade. It holds promise for facilitating the urgent task of documenting the world’s dwindling linguistic diversity. Various methodological hurdles are encountered in the course of this exciting development, however. A well-identified difficulty is that data preprocessing is not at all trivial: data collected in classical fieldwork are usually tailored to the needs of the linguist who collects them, and there is baffling diversity in formats and annotation schema, even among fieldworkers who use the same software package (such as ELAN). The tests reported here (on Yongning Na and other languages from the Pangloss Collection, an open archive of endangered languages) explore some possibilities for automating the process of data preprocessing: assessing to what extent it is possible to bypass the involvement of language experts for menial tasks of data preparation for Natural Language Processing (NLP) purposes. What is at stake is the accessibility of language archive data for a range of NLP tasks and beyond.
Anthology ID:
2020.sltu-1.43
Volume:
Proceedings of the 1st Joint Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU) and Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages (CCURL)
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Dorothee Beermann, Laurent Besacier, Sakriani Sakti, Claudia Soria
Venue:
SLTU
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources association
Note:
Pages:
306–315
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sltu-1.43
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guillaume Wisniewski, Séverine Guillaume, and Alexis Michaud. 2020. Phonemic Transcription of Low-Resource Languages: To What Extent can Preprocessing be Automated?. In Proceedings of the 1st Joint Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-resourced languages (SLTU) and Collaboration and Computing for Under-Resourced Languages (CCURL), pages 306–315, Marseille, France. European Language Resources association.
Cite (Informal):
Phonemic Transcription of Low-Resource Languages: To What Extent can Preprocessing be Automated? (Wisniewski et al., SLTU 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.sltu-1.43.pdf