The effect of language identification accuracy on speech recognition accuracy of proper names

Abstract

Utilising the known language of origin of a name can be useful when predicting the pronunciation of the name. When this language is not known, automatic language identification (LID) can be used to influence which language-specific grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) predictor is triggered to produce a pronunciation for the name. We investigate the implications when both the LID system and the G2P system generate errors: what influence does this have on a resulting speech recognition system? We experiment with different approaches to LID-based dictionary creation and report on results in four South African languages: Afrikaans, English, Sesotho and isiZulu.