Towards Rapid Language Portability Of Speech Processing Systems

In recent years, more and more speech processing products in several languages have been widely distributed all over the world. This fact reflects the general believe that speech technologies have a huge potential to let everyone participate in today's information revolution and to bridge the language barriers. However, the development of speech processing systems still requires significant skills and resources to be carried out. With some 4500- 6000 languages in the world, the current cost and effort in building speech support is prohibitive to all but the top, most economically viable languages. In order to overcome these limitations, our research centers around the development of new algorithms and tools to rapidly port speech processing systems to new languages. This paper focuses on our approaches to create acoustic models, pronunciation dictionaries, and language models in new languages with only limited or no data resources available in the language of question. For this purpose we developed language independent and language adaptive acoustic models, investigated pronunciation dictionaries which can be directly derived from the written form and propose cross-lingual language model adaptation. The approaches are evaluated on our multilingual text and speech database GlobalPhone which covers more than 15 languages of the world