lex4all/lex4all

pronunciation LEXicons for Any Low-resource Language ## lex4all: pronunciation LEXicons for Any Low-resource Language ### lex4all.github.io #### A project of the Department of Computational Linguistics, Saarland University, Germany ### Creators: Anjana Vakil & Max Paulus ### Advisors: Alexis Palmer & Michaela Regneri ### Contributors: Kayokwa Chibuye (University of Cape Town, South Africa) Developers trying to incorporate speech recognition interfaces in a low-resource language (LRL) into their applications currently face the hurdle of not finding recognition engines trained on their target language. Although tools such as Carnegie Mellon University's Sphinx simplify the creation of new acoustic models for recognition, they require large amounts of training data (audio recordings) in the target language. However, for small-vocabulary applications, an existing recognizer for a high-resource language (HRL) can be used to perform recognition in the target language. This requires a pronunciation lexicon mapping the relevant words in the target language into sequences of sounds in the HRL. lex4all is an easy-to-use desktop application for Windows that will allow even naive users to automatically create a pronunciation lexicon for words in any language, using a small number of audio recordings and a pre-existing recognition engine in a HRL such as English. The resulting lexicon can then be used to add small-vocabulary speech recognition functionality to applications in the LRL. #### How it works A simple user interface allows the user to easily specify one written form (text string) and and one or more audio samples (`.wav` files) for each word in the target vocabulary, and to set other options (e.g. number of pronunciations per word, name/save location of lexicon file, etc.). The audio is then passed to a speech recognition engine for a HRL (English). An automatic pronunciation generation algorithm (the Salaam method, [2–3]) finds the best pronunciation(s) for each word in the LRL vocabulary. The pr …