Jacob Lee Suchardt
2025
Towards Language-Agnostic STIPA: Universal Phonetic Transcription to Support Language Documentation at Scale
Jacob Lee Suchardt
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Hana El-Shazli
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Pierluigi Cassotti
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
This paper explores the use of existing state-of-the-art speech recognition models (ASR) for the task of generating narrow phonetic transcriptions using the International Phonetic Alphabet (STIPA). Unlike conventional ASR systems focused on orthographic output for high-resource languages, STIPA can be used as a language-agnostic interface valuable for documenting under-resourced and unwritten languages. We introduce a new dataset for South Levantine Arabic and present the first large-scale evaluation of STIPA models across 51 language families. Additionally, we provide a use case on Sanna, a severely endangered language. Our findings show that fine-tuned ASR models can produce accurate IPA transcriptions with limited supervision, significantly reducing phonetic error rates even in extremely low-resource settings. The results highlight the potential of STIPA for scalable language documentation.