Language-independent and language-adaptive acoustic modeling for speech recognition

With the distribution of speech technology products all over the world, the portability to new target languages becomes a practical concern. As a consequence our research focuses on the question of how to port large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) systems in a fast and efficient way. More specifically we want to estimate acoustic models for a new target language using speech data from varied source languages, but only limited data from the target language. For this purpose, we introduce different methods for multilingual acoustic model combination and a polyphone decision tree specialization procedure. Recognition results using language-dependent, independent and language-adaptive acoustic models are presented and discussed in the framework of our GlobalPhone project which investigates LVCSR systems in 15 languages. (C) 2001 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.