USING MALAY RESOURCES TO BOOTSTRAP ASR FOR A VERY UNDER-RESOURCED LANGUAGE: IBAN

This paper describes our experiments and results on using a local dominant language in Malaysia (Malay), to boot-strap automatic speech recognition (ASR) for a very under-resourced language: Iban (also spoken in Malaysia on the Borneo Island part). Resources in Iban for building a speech recognition were nonexistent. For this, we tried to take ad-vantage of a language from the same family with several similarities. First, to deal with the pronunciation dictionary, we proposed a bootstrapping strategy to develop an Iban pronunciation lexicon from a Malay one. A hybrid version, mix of Malay and Iban pronunciations, was also built and evaluated. Following this, we experimented with three Iban ASRs; each depended on either one of the three different pronunciation dictionaries: Malay, Iban or hybrid. Index Terms — under-resourced languages, speech recog-nition, Iban language, Malay language, bootstrapping, Kaldi 1