This paper presents our bootstrapping efforts of producing the first large freely available Croatian automatic speech recognition (ASR) dataset, 1,816 hours in size, obtained from parliamentary transcripts and recordings from the ParlaMint corpus. The bootstrapping approach to the dataset building relies on a commercial ASR system for initial data alignment, and building a multilingual-transformer-based ASR system from the initial data for full data alignment. Experiments on the resulting dataset show that the difference between the spoken content and the parliamentary transcripts is present in ~4-5% of words, which is also the word error rate of our best-performing ASR system. Interestingly, fine-tuning transformer models on either normalized or original data does not show a difference in performance. Models pre-trained on a subset of raw speech data consisting of Slavic languages only show to perform better than those pre-trained on a wider set of languages. With our public release of data, models and code, we are paving the way forward for the preparation of the multi-modal corpus of Croatian parliamentary proceedings, as well as for the development of similar free datasets, models and corpora for other under-resourced languages.

In this paper we present newly developed inflectional lexcions and manually annotated corpora of Croatian and Serbian. We introduce hrLex and srLex - two freely available inflectional lexicons of Croatian and Serbian - and describe the process of building these lexicons, supported by supervised machine learning techniques for lemma and paradigm prediction. Furthermore, we introduce hr500k, a manually annotated corpus of Croatian, 500 thousand tokens in size. We showcase the three newly developed resources on the task of morphosyntactic annotation of both languages by using a recently developed CRF tagger. We achieve best results yet reported on the task for both languages, beating the HunPos baseline trained on the same datasets by a wide margin.