The Impact of Accents on Automatic Recognition of South African English Speech: A Preliminary Investigation

Mbogho, Audrey and Katz, Michelle (2010) The Impact of Accents on Automatic Recognition of South African English Speech: A Preliminary Investigation, Proceedings of Annual Conference of South African Institute for Computer Scientists and Information Technologists (SAICSIT) 2010, 11-13 October 2010, Bela Bela, South Africa, 187-192, ACM.

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Abstract

The accent with which words are spoken can have a strong effect on the performance of a speech recognition system. In a multilingual country such as South Africa where English is not the first language of most citizens, the need to address this issue is critical when building speech-based systems. In this project we trained two sets of hidden Markov Models for isolated word English speech. The first set of models was trained with native English speakers and the second set was trained with non-native speakers from a representative sample of major South African accent groups. We compared the recognition accuracies of the two sets of models and found that the models trained with accented English performed better. This preliminary research indicates that there is merit to committing resources to the task of accented training.

Item Type: Conference paper
Uncontrolled Keywords: Speech Recognition
Subjects: Computing methodologies > Artificial intelligence
Date Deposited: 07 Nov 2010
Last Modified: 10 Oct 2019 15:33
URI: http://pubs.cs.uct.ac.za/id/eprint/635

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