A Study on Native American English Speech Recognition by Indian Listeners with Varying Word Familiarity Level

Singh, A and Mv, AR and Vaideeswaran, R and Yarra, C and Ghosh, PK (2021) A Study on Native American English Speech Recognition by Indian Listeners with Varying Word Familiarity Level. In: 24th Conference of the Oriental COCOSDA International Committee for the Co-Ordination and Standardisation of Speech Databases and Assessment Techniques, 18-20 Nov 2021, Singapore, pp. 13-18.

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Abstract

In this study, listeners of varied Indian nativities are asked to listen and recognize TIMIT utterances spoken by American speakers. We have three kinds of responses from each listener while they recognize an utterance: 1. Sentence difficulty ratings, 2. Speaker difficulty ratings, and 3. Transcription of the utterance. From these transcriptions, word error rate (WER) is calculated and used as a metric to evaluate the similarity between the recognized and the original sentences. The sentences selected in this study are categorized into three groups: Easy, Medium and Hard, based on the frequency of occurrence of the words in them. We observe that the sentence, speaker difficulty ratings and the WERs increase from easy to hard categories of sentences. We also compare the human speech recognition performance with that using three automatic speech recognition (ASR) under following three combinations of acoustic model (AM) and language model (LM): ASR1) AM trained with recordings from speakers of Indian origin and LM built on TIMIT text, ASR2) AM using recordings from native American speakers and LM built on text from LIBRI speech corpus, and ASR3) AM using recordings from native American speakers and LM build on LIBRI speech and TIMIT text. We observe that HSR performance is similar to that of ASR1 whereas ASR3 achieves the best performance. Speaker nativity wise analysis shows that utterances from speakers of some nativity are more difficult to recognize by Indian listeners compared to few other nativities. © 2021 IEEE.

Item Type:	Conference Paper
Publication:	2021 24th Conference of the Oriental COCOSDA International Committee for the Co-Ordination and Standardisation of Speech Databases and Assessment Techniques, O-COCOSDA 2021
Publisher:	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Additional Information:	The copyright for this article belongs to Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Keywords:	Audio recordings; Character recognition; Speech, Acoustics model; American English; Automatic speech recognition; Human speech; Human speech recognition; Language model; Native Americans; Performance; Speaker model; Word familiarity, Speech recognition
Department/Centre:	Division of Electrical Sciences > Electrical Engineering
Date Deposited:	09 Mar 2022 10:28
Last Modified:	09 Mar 2022 10:28
URI:	http://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/71534

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