This paper describes the winning approach in the public SwissText 2021  competition on dialect recognition and translation of Swiss German speech to standard German text . Swiss German refers to the multitude of Alemannic dialects spoken in the German-speaking parts of Switzerland. Swiss German differs significantly from standard German in pronunciation, word inventory and grammar. It is mostly incomprehensible to native German speakers. Moreover, it lacks a standardized written script. To solve the challenging task, we propose a hybrid automatic speech recognition system with a lexicon that incorporates translations, a 1st pass language model that deals with Swiss German particularities, a transfer-learned acoustic model and a strong neural language model for 2nd pass rescoring. Our submission reaches 46.04\% BLEU on a blind conversational test set and outperforms the second best competitor by a 12\% relative margin.
This paper describes the winning approach in the Shared Task 3 at SwissText 2021 on Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text, a public competition on dialect recognition and translation . Swiss German refers to the multitude of Alemannic dialects spoken in the German-speaking parts of Switzerland. Swiss German differs significantly from standard German in pronunciation, word inventory and grammar. It is mostly incomprehensible to native German speakers. Moreover, it lacks a standardized written script. To solve the challenging task, we propose a hybrid automatic speech recognition system with a lexicon that incorporates translations, a 1st pass language model that deals with Swiss German particularities, a transfer-learned acoustic model and a strong neural language model for 2nd pass rescoring. Our submission reaches 46.04\% BLEU on a blind conversational test set and outperforms the second best competitor by a 12\% relative margin.
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public
Shared Task 3 at
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on Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text, a public
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of Swiss German speech to standard German text