Grapheme-based speech recognition systems are faster to develop but typically do not reach the same level of performance as phoneme-based systems. In this paper we introduce a technique for improving the performance of ...

This paper compares the recognition accuracy of a phoneme-based automatic speech recognition system with that of a grapheme-based system, using Afrikaans as case study. The first system is developed using a conventional ...

We investigate the effectiveness with which the accuracy of a prompted speech corpus can be validated when minimal additional speech resources are available, and specifically when a language model in the target language ...

We improve on a piece-wise linear model of the trajectories of Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients, which are commonly used as features in Automatic Speech Recognition. For this purpose, we have created a very clean ...

We report on the development of speech-recognition systems that are able to perform accurate recognition on mediumvocabulary tasks (i.e. tasks that require distinctions between approximately 200 different terms). We are ...

In a multilingual society such as South Africa, a practical directory enquiries (DE) application should be able to serve users from various language backgrounds with information relating to names in various languages: a ...

Code switching (the process of switching from one language to another during a conversation) is a common phenomenon in multilingual environments. Where a minority and dominant language coincide, code switching from the ...

This paper reports on the automatic alignment of audiobooks in Afrikaans. An existing Afrikaans pronunciation dictionary and corpus of Afrikaans speech data are used to generate baseline acoustic models. The baseline system ...

Smartphones provide an efficient means for the collection of speech data; however, the quality of the corpora created in this fashion is not predictable. We describe an approach that allows us to post-process and rank ...