Rey Castillo García


2021

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Leveraging End-to-End ASR for Endangered Language Documentation: An Empirical Study on Yolóxochitl Mixtec
Jiatong Shi | Jonathan D. Amith | Rey Castillo García | Esteban Guadalupe Sierra | Kevin Duh | Shinji Watanabe
Proceedings of the 16th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Main Volume

“Transcription bottlenecks”, created by a shortage of effective human transcribers (i.e., transcriber shortage), are one of the main challenges to endangered language (EL) documentation. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been suggested as a tool to overcome such bottlenecks. Following this suggestion, we investigated the effectiveness for EL documentation of end-to-end ASR, which unlike Hidden Markov Model ASR systems, eschews linguistic resources but is instead more dependent on large-data settings. We open source a Yoloxóchitl Mixtec EL corpus. First, we review our method in building an end-to-end ASR system in a way that would be reproducible by the ASR community. We then propose a novice transcription correction task and demonstrate how ASR systems and novice transcribers can work together to improve EL documentation. We believe this combinatory methodology would mitigate the transcription bottleneck and transcriber shortage that hinders EL documentation.

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End-to-End Automatic Speech Recognition: Its Impact on the Workflowin Documenting Yoloxóchitl Mixtec
Jonathan D. Amith | Jiatong Shi | Rey Castillo García
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Natural Language Processing for Indigenous Languages of the Americas

This paper describes three open access Yoloxóchitl Mixtec corpora and presents the results and implications of end-to-end automatic speech recognition for endangered language documentation. Two issues are addressed. First, the advantage for ASR accuracy of targeting informational (BPE) units in addition to, or in substitution of, linguistic units (word, morpheme, morae) and then using ROVER for system combination. BPE units consistently outperform linguistic units although the best results are obtained by system combination of different BPE targets. Second, a case is made that for endangered language documentation, ASR contributions should be evaluated according to extrinsic criteria (e.g., positive impact on downstream tasks) and not simply intrinsic metrics (e.g., CER and WER). The extrinsic metric chosen is the level of reduction in the human effort needed to produce high-quality transcriptions for permanent archiving.