Conference Proceedings
Building Speech Recognition Systems for Language Documentation: The CoEDL Endangered Language Pipeline and Inference System (ELPIS)
Ben Foley, Josh Arnold, Rolando Coto-Solano, Gautier Durantin, Ellison Mark, Daan van Esch, Scott Heath, František Kratochvíl, Zara Maxwell-Smith, David Nash, Ola Olsson, Mark Richards, Nay San, Hywel Stoakes, N Thieberger, Janet Wiles
Proceedings of The 6th International Workshop on Spoken Language Technologies for Under-Resourced Languages | International Speech Communication Association | Published : 2018
DOI: 10.21437/SLTU.2018
Abstract
Machine learning has revolutionised speech technologies for major world languages, but these technologies have generally not been available for the roughly 4,000 languages with populations of fewer than 10,000 speakers. This paper describes the development of Elpis, a pipeline which language documentation workers with minimal computational experience can use to build their own speech recognition models, resulting in models being built for 16 languages from the Asia-Pacific region. Elpis puts machine learning speech technologies within reach of people working with languages with scarce data, in a scalable way. This is impactful since it enables language communities to cross the digital divide..
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