When modelling code-switched speech (utterances that contain a mixture of languages), the embedded language often contains phones not found in the matrix language. These are typically dealt with by either extending the ...

We present our process for the development and analysis of a multilingual names corpus, called Multipron-split. It is derived from Multipron, a corpus collected in previous work [1], where names and speakers were drawn ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Various factors influence the accuracy with which the language of individual words can be classified using n-grams. We consider a South African text-based language identification (LID) task and experiment with two different ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...