Cross-Lingual Automatic Speech Recognition Using Tandem Features

In this work, the performance of Multilingual Phone Recognition System (Multi-PRS) is improved using articulatory features (AFs). Four Indian languages – Kannada, Telugu, Bengali and Odia – are used for developing Multi-PRS. The transcription is derived using international phonetic alphabets (IPAs). Multi-PRS is trained using hidden Markov models and the state-of-the-art Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). AFs for five AF groups – place, manner, roundness, frontness and height – are predicted from Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs) using DNNs. The oracle AFs, which are derived from the ground truth IPA transcriptions, are used to set the best performance realizable by the predicted AFs. The performances of predicted and oracle AFs are compared. In addition to the AFs, the phone posteriors are explored to further boost the performance of Multi-PRS. Multi-task learning is explored to improve the prediction accuracy of AFs and thereby reduce the Phone Error Rates (PERs) of Multi-PRSs. Fusion of AFs is done using two approaches: i) lattice re-scoring approach and ii) AFs as tandem features. We show that oracle AFs by feature fusion with MFCCs offer a remarkably low target of PER of 10.4%, which is 24.7% absolute reduction compared with baseline Multi-PRS with MFCCs alone. The best performing system using predicted AFs has shown 3.2% reduction in absolute PER (9.1% reduction in relative PER) compared with baseline Multi-PRS. The best performance is obtained using the tandem approach for fusion of various AFs and phone posteriors.

We consider the pronunciation assessment of vowels of Indian English uttered by speakers with Gujarati L1 using confidence measures obtained by automatic speech recognition. The goodness-of-pronunciation measure as captured by the acoustic likelihood scores can be effective only when the acoustic models used are appropriate for the task i.e. detecting errors in the target language (Indian English) typical of speakers of Gujarati (the source language). Thus the speech data used for acoustic model training is expected to have a prominent influence on system performance. In the absence of labeled speech databases of either the source or target language, we investigate specific combinations of acoustic models trained on available databases of American English and Hindi. It is observed that Indian English speech is better represented by Hindi speech models for vowels common to the two languages rather than by American English models. Further, adaptation with a limited amount of Indian English speech improves the system performance.

We describe two voice-to-phoneme conversion algorithms for speaker-independent voice-tag creation specifically targeted at applications on embedded platforms. These algorithms (batch mode and sequential) are compared in speech recognition experiments where they are first applied in a same-language context in which both acoustic model training and voice-tag creation and application are performed on the same language. Then, their performance is tested in a cross-language setting where the acoustic models are trained on a particular source language while the voice-tags are created and applied on a different target language. In the same-language environment, both algorithms either perform comparably to or significantly better than the baseline where utterances are manually transcribed by a phonetician. In the cross-language context, the voice-tag performances vary depending on the source-target language pair, with the variation reflecting predicted phonological similarity between the source and target languages. Among the most similar languages, performance nears that of the native-trained models and surpasses the native reference baseline.

The present study proposes a source speech register analysis model that incorporates textual and situational components and parameters of register equivalence in the target language to identify the relations between the source language register and student interpreter’s performance, textual register mismatch between the source and target languages, and the relevance between register equivalence parameters in the target language and interpreting quality. The findings are as follows: first, source language register does have influence on interpreter’s performance, and relations exist between the two. In general, higher source language register brings better interpreting quality. Three assessment criteria and the overall quality differ across different levels of registers in the source language. Second, register mismatch between the source and target languages happens since interpreters are inclined to lower the register of interpreting output from the high-register source speech and increase the register level in the target language in the case of the low-register speech. Third, intonation and voice have the highest correlations with the interpreters’ performance. Fluency ranks the second, and lexical-semantic choices the third.

The subspace Gaussian mixture model (SGMM) has been exploited for cross-lingual speech recognition. The general motivation is that the subspace parameters can be estimated on multiple source languages and then transferred to the target language. In this work, we investigate an extension to SGMM, referred to as subspace mixture model (SMM), in which subspace parameters on the target language are casted as a linear mixture of the subspaces derived from source languages. This approach reduces the number of SGMM model parameters, while retaining the flexibility of subspace learning on the target language. Experiments show that the proposed SMM method outperforms SGMM significantly when the target language has limited training data.

We study a new problem of cross-lingual transfer learning for event coreference resolution (ECR) where models trained on data from a source language are adapted for evaluations in different target languages. We introduce the first baseline model for this task based on XLM-RoBERTa, a state-of-the-art multilingual pre-trained language model. We also explore language adversarial neural networks (LANN) that present language discriminators to distinguish texts from the source and target languages to improve the language generalization for ECR. In addition, we introduce two novel mechanisms to further enhance the general representation learning of LANN, featuring: (i) multi-view alignment to penalize cross coreference-label alignment of examples in the source and target languages, and (ii) optimal transport to select close examples in the source and target languages to provide better training signals for the language discriminators. Finally, we perform extensive experiments for cross-lingual ECR from English to Spanish and Chinese to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.

The study focuses on teaching the translation of audiovisual memes: comic image/video and text combinations that tend to go viral on the Internet. The key features of a meme are a comic effect resulting from surprise, disrupted expectations, the clash between the text and the video; “viral” expansion across the Internet and other social media. Mastering the skills required to translate such audiovisual content is essential since memes are highly popular on the Internet with all age groups, there are numerous allusions references to the popular memes in the mass media, fiction, movies, and TV series. Teaching audiovisual meme translation shall consist of analyzing the meme properties, building meme comprehension and metacognitive analysis skills, and mastering specific approaches and techniques for meme representation in the source and target languages. An emphasis should be placed on developing the ability to adequately reconstruct meme ecosystems in the source language and find their analogs in the target language as well as the skills required to identify archetypical narratives in the source language and build them in the target language. It is shown that memes have some similarities to set expressions and proverbs. The meme translation curriculum shall build the ability to find and translate set expressions and proverbs in audiovisual works. It is also shown that translation teachers should have specialized training in teaching the translation of memes as a special type of audiovisual content. It can be implemented in the format of short seminars/webinars, or within the teacher further education framework.

This paper describes the extended pivot-based approach for bilingual lexicon extraction. The basic features of the approach can be described as follows: First, the approach builds context vectors between a source (or target) language and a pivot language like English, respectively. This is the same as the standard pivot-based approach which is useful for extracting bilingual lexicons between low-resource languages such as Korean-French. Second, unlike the standard pivot-based approach, the approach looks for similar context vec- tors in a source language. This is helpful to extract translation candidates for polysemous words as well as lets the translations be more confident. Third, the approach extracts translation candidates from target context vectors through the similarity between source and target context vectors. Based on these features, this paper describes the extended pivot-based approach and does various experiments in a language pair, Korean-French (KR-FR). We have observed that the approach is useful for extracting the most proper translation candidate as well as for a low-resource language pair.

This paper discusses English-poetry translation, Heusca by John Conford into Indonesian translated by Chairil Anwar. The purpose of this study is to determine how the translator considers aesthetic and expressive values from the source language and translate them into target language. Aesthetic values are the means of delivery thought through the use of poetic language such as diction or word choice, metaphor, imageri, and others figurative language. Meanwhile, the expressive values are the means of delivery thoughts through the author's mind or emotions such as structure, rhyme, and pronunciation. The method used in this study is a qualitative descriptive analysis of the meaning. The results of analysis show that in terms of meaning, aesthetic values, and structures, Heusca is the result of a semantic translation and faithful to source language. Translator managed to retain the meaning of source language. In other word, the translation can meet the requirements of fidelity. In terms of expressive values in particular aspects of meter and rhyme are not so faithful to source language because the source language and the target language have some differences. Basically, this is acceptable that the Indonesian language as target language has a very big difference in terms of pronunciation with English as the source language. As a result, meter and rhyme of target language may not be forced into the source language without damaging the naturalness of meaning for target language readers. It can be said that the translation can meet the transparency criteria because source language appeared in poetry comes naturally to native speakers of English.

We propose a new method to resolve ambiguity in translation and meaning interpretation using linguistic statistics extracted from dual corpora of source and target languages in addition to the logical restrictions described on dictionary and grammar rules for ambiguity resolution. It provides reasonable criteria for determining a suitable equivalent translation or meaning by making the dependency relation in the source language be reflected in the translated text. The method can be tractable because the required statistics can be computed semi-automatically in advance from a source language corpus and a target language corpus, while an ordinal corpus-based translation method needs a large volume of bilingual corpus of strict pairs of a sentence and its translation. Moreover, it also provides the means to compute the linguistic statistics on the pairs of meaning expressions.

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2015v35nesp2p289Este texto centra-se nas questões do trabalho do Intérprete de Língua de Sinais na condição de segundo enunciador da produção discursiva. Esses profissionais, no momento da interpretação, buscam recriar [atualizar] os conceitos emanados da língua fonte para a língua alvo, instaurando, assim, uma segunda instância enunciativa. O quadro teórico mobilizado situa-se na perspectiva da Linguística Enunciativa (BENVENISTE, 1989; FLORES, 2008, 2009a, 2009b, 2010) e no estudo dos modais em línguas orais e na LIBRAS. Tem-se, por objetivos, buscar as marcas deixadas pelo segundo sujeito enunciador do texto, neste caso, o intérprete, quanto ao uso de modais especificamente e analisar as escolhas desse segundo sujeito enunciador por utilizar um ou outro tipo de modal (no texto alvo), que esteja explícito ou implícito na primeira situação de enunciação (no texto fonte). Para análise, a fala de uma pessoa surda, com tempo total de 40' (quarenta minutos), que estava sendo interpretada para o Português oral, foi transcrita. Após a transcrição, 6 (seis) excertos da fala total, com ocorrências de modais na língua fonte ou alvo, foram analisados. Em função das análises empreendidas, pontua-se: 1. a tendência de que a modalidade deôntica seja quase sempre interpretada como na língua fonte; 2. as escolhas interpretativas são sempre guiadas por pistas enunciativas deixadas na fala do primeiro enunciador, para as quais o intérprete deve revelar domínio de aspectos pertinentes tanto à língua fonte quanto à língua alvo; 3. na ausência de marcas modais explícitas, os intérpretes são sensíveis às noções modais extravasadas por toda a superfície textual; 4. a omissão temporal na interpretação de modais epistêmicos de grande valor de aderência podendo funcionar como uma estratégia interpretativa e não como um falseamento da informação original; 5. a noção de “tempo de checagem”, sendo proposta para recobrir o tempo (não cronológico) no qual o intérprete, após receber a informação da língua fonte, realizasua interpretação.

The ongoing debate on code switching (CS) in multilingual societies and Foreign Language (FL) classes is still relevant and worth considering. This linguistic phenomenon simply refers to altering from one language to another during speech and writing (Richards and Schmidt 2013). While some authorities propose that interactions between learners and instructors in the FL class be carried out only in the target language, other opinions favour a careful blend of both target and source languages. Ghana, a multilingual country in West Africa, adopted English as its official language during the colonial era. French was later introduced to promote regional integration among Ghana and her neighbours, especially since Ghana is greatly surrounded by francophone countries within the subregion (Gandolfi et al. 2021). French has since then been the second most widely taught FL in the country, with a presence in almost all stages of the Ghanaian academic trajectory. This multilingual position of Ghana makes it common to find elements of CS present in FL classrooms, where both instructors and learners occasionally resort to English for instructional conversations (Chachu 2016). This study focuses on university students’ perceptions of CS between English as the source language and French as a foreign language (FFL) during the instruction of the latter. Some frameworks for teaching and learning FFL in Ghana prefer that the language of instruction and interaction be limited to the target language only (Soku and Azanku 2015). The Common European Framework of References for Languages (CEFR) however, suggests the possible use of CS for purposes of instruction when there are favourable conditions (Council of Europe 2001). To identify the roles of CS and investigate FL students’ opinions on this, our data was gathered from classroom observations and questionnaires that had both Likert scale and open-ended questions. This was at the end of their first semester of studying university-level FFL. It was observed that CS plays a significant role in the understanding of linguistic concepts and greatly improves students’ engagement and participation in the FL class. Of the 36 respondents, 34 felt their academic needs were met when the language of instruction and interaction alternated between French and English. Twenty-nine students reported losing focus easily in the FFL class in instances where the medium of interaction was limited to French alone, while 26 reported feeling nervous whenever they were asked to only communicate in French. For metalinguistic aspects of the language, 33 students, constituting 91.7% were of the view that a careful blend of English and French could go a long way to aid their understanding and foster the learning of grammatical concepts. Generally, students attested to better retention of vocabulary in the target language when there was a good blend of both languages. It is recommended therefore that language instructors resort periodically to CS to ensure understanding and engagement from students. CS also helps learners have the opportunity to intervene with their limited linguistic structures when they are faced with linguistic challenges in the FL classroom. Click here to read the corresponding ISSOTL blog post.

Cross-lingual word embeddings display words from different languages in the same vector space. They provide reasoning about semantics, compare the meaning of words across languages and word meaning in multilingual contexts, necessary to bilingual lexicon induction, machine translation, and cross-lingual information retrieval. This paper proposes an efficient approach to learn bilingual transform mapping between monolingual word embeddings in language pairs. We choose ten different languages from three different language families and downloaded their last update Wikipedia dumps1 1. https://dumps.wikimedia.org. Then, with some pre-processing steps and using word2vec, we produce word embeddings for them. We select seven language pairs from chosen languages. Since the selected languages are relative, they have thousands of identical words with similar meanings. With these identical dictation words and word embedding models of each language, we create training, validation and, test sets for the language pairs. We then use a generative adversarial network (GAN) to learn the transform mapping between word embeddings of source and target languages. The average accuracy of our proposed method in all language pairs is 71.34%. The highest accuracy is achieved for the Turkish-Azerbaijani language pair with the accuracy 78.32%., which is noticeably higher than prior methods.

This paper considers the unsupervised domain adaptation problem for neural machine translation (NMT), where we assume the access to only monolingual text in either the source or target language in the new domain. We propose a cross-lingual data selection method to extract in-domain sentences in the missing language side from a large generic monolingual corpus. Our proposed method trains an adaptive layer on top of multilingual BERT by contrastive learning to align the representation between the source and target language. This then enables the transferability of the domain classifier between the languages in a zero-shot manner. Once the in-domain data is detected by the classifier, the NMT model is then adapted to the new domain by jointly learning translation and domain discrimination tasks. We evaluate our cross-lingual data selection method on NMT across five diverse domains in three language pairs, as well as a real-world scenario of translation for COVID-19. The results show that our proposed method outperforms other selection baselines up to +1.5 BLEU score.

Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) has been the dominant corpus-based machine translation (MT) approach in the last twenty years. While SMT has been studied in detail among European languages, it has not been studied sufficiently in language pairs including Turkish as source or target language, and its study has been limited mostly to English ↔ Turkish language pair. This study aims to broaden the perspective on Turkish corpus-based MT studies by training MT engines between Turkish and a wide variety of languages with different features. It surveys customized SMT between Turkish and 11 different languages. Twenty-two SMT engines have been trained in KantanMT with open parallel corpora using Turkish as both source and target language. Three automatic evaluation metrics F-Measure, BLEU, and TER have been used for evaluating MT quality. Due to the variations in the corpus quality and size, highly varying results have been achieved. While Turkish ↔ Catalan engines have had the highest automatic evaluation scores, Turkish ↔ Arabic engines have had the lowest automatic scores. While the quality results are highly varying across languages, we obtain baseline scores for a wide variety of languages coupled with Turkish. These results may provide a reference point for evaluating future MT systems including Turkish.