Question: Can the speech from an unrelated language be of some help in the design of an ASR for a very low resource language?
Evidence: First, we evaluated the standard HMM model with an uninformative prior (this will be our baseline) for the two different input features: MFCC (and derivatives) and MBN. Results are shown in Table TABREF20 . Surprisingly, the MBN features perform relatively poorly compared to the standard MFCC. These results are contradictory to those reported in BIBREF3 . Two factors may explain this discrepancy: the Mboshi5k data being different from the training data of the MBN neural network, the neural network may not generalize well. Another possibility may be that the initialization scheme of the model is not suitable for this type of features. Indeed, Variational Bayesian Inference algorithm converges only to a local optimum of the objective function and is therefore dependent of the initialization. We believe the second explanation is the more likely since, as we shall see shortly, the best results in term of word segmentation and NMI are eventually obtained with the MBN features when the inference is done with the informative prior. Next, we compared the HMM and the SVAE models when trained with an uninformative prior (lines with "Inf. Prior" set to "no" in Table TABREF23 ). The SVAE significantly improves the NMI and the precision showing that it extracts more consistent units than the HMM model. However, it also degrades the segmentation in terms of recall. We further investigated this behavior by looking at the duration of the units found by both models compared to the true phones (Table TABREF22 ). We observe that the SVAE model favors longer units than the HMM model hence leading to fewer boundaries and consequently smaller recall.
We then evaluated the effect of the informative prior on the acoustic unit discovery (Table TABREF23 ). On all 4 combinations (2 features sets INLINEFORM0 2 models) we observe an improvement in terms of precision and NMI but a degradation of the recall. This result is encouraging since the informative prior was trained on English data (TIMIT) which is very different from Mboshi. Indeed, this suggests that even speech from an unrelated language can be of some help in the design of an ASR for a very low resource language. Finally, similarly to the SVAE/HMM case described above, we found that the degradation of the recall is due to longer units discovered for models with an informative prior (numbers omitted due to lack of space).
Word discovery results are given in Table TABREF21 for the Boundary metric BIBREF20 , BIBREF21 . We observe that i) the best word boundary detection (F-score) is obtained with MBN features, an informative prior and the SVAE model; this confirms the results of table TABREF23 and shows that better AUD leads to better word segmentation ii) word segmentation from AUD graph Lattices is slightly better than from flat sequences of AUD symbols (1-best); iii) our results outperform a pure speech based baseline based on segmental DTW BIBREF22 (F-score of 19.3% on the exact same corpus).
Indeed, this suggests that even speech from an unrelated language can be of some help in the design of an ASR for a very low resource language.
Answer: Yes, it can.