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Multi-Graph Decoding for Code-Switching ASR

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 Added by Emre Yilmaz
 Publication date 2019
and research's language is English




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In the FAME! Project, a code-switching (CS) automatic speech recognition (ASR) system for Frisian-Dutch speech is developed that can accurately transcribe the local broadcasters bilingual archives with CS speech. This archive contains recordings with monolingual Frisian and Dutch speech segments as well as Frisian-Dutch CS speech, hence the recognition performance on monolingual segments is also vital for accurate transcriptions. In this work, we propose a multi-graph decoding and rescoring strategy using bilingual and monolingual graphs together with a unified acoustic model for CS ASR. The proposed decoding scheme gives the freedom to design and employ alternative search spaces for each (monolingual or bilingual) recognition task and enables the effective use of monolingual resources of the high-resourced mixed language in low-resourced CS scenarios. In our scenario, Dutch is the high-resourced and Frisian is the low-resourced language. We therefore use additional monolingual Dutch text resources to improve the Dutch language model (LM) and compare the performance of single- and multi-graph CS ASR systems on Dutch segments using larger Dutch LMs. The ASR results show that the proposed approach outperforms baseline single-graph CS ASR systems, providing better performance on the monolingual Dutch segments without any accuracy loss on monolingual Frisian and code-mixed segments.



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Code-switching (CS) detection refers to the automatic detection of language switches in code-mixed utterances. This task can be achieved by using a CS automatic speech recognition (ASR) system that can handle such language switches. In our previous work, we have investigated the code-switching detection performance of the Frisian-Dutch CS ASR system by using the time alignment of the most likely hypothesis and found that this technique suffers from over-switching due to numerous very short spurious language switches. In this paper, we propose a novel method for CS detection aiming to remedy this shortcoming by using the language posteriors which are the sum of the frame-level posteriors of phones belonging to the same language. The CS ASR-generated language posteriors contain more complete language-specific information on frame level compared to the time alignment of the ASR output. Hence, it is expected to yield more accurate and robust CS detection. The CS detection experiments demonstrate that the proposed language posterior-based approach provides higher detection accuracy than the baseline system in terms of equal error rate. Moreover, a detailed CS detection error analysis reveals that using language posteriors reduces the false alarms and results in more robust CS detection.
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