Multilingual Speech Recognition for Turkic Languages

Abstract

The primary aim of this study was to contribute to the development of multilingual automatic speech recognition for lower-resourced Turkic languages. Ten languages—Azerbaijani, Bashkir, Chuvash, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Sakha, Tatar, Turkish, Uyghur, and Uzbek—were considered. A total of 22 models were developed (13 monolingual and 9 multilingual). The multilingual models that were trained using joint speech data performed more robustly than the baseline monolingual models, with the best model achieving an average character and word error rate reduction of 56.7%/54.3%, respectively. The results of the experiment showed that character and word error rate reduction was more likely when multilingual models were trained with data from related Turkic languages than when they were developed using data from unrelated, non-Turkic languages, such as English and Russian. The study also presented an open-source Turkish speech corpus. The corpus contains 218.2 h of transcribed speech with 186,171 utterances and is the largest publicly available Turkish dataset of its kind. The datasets and codes used to train the models are available for download from our GitHub page.

Keywords

• automatic speech recognition
• multilingual speech recognition
• Turkic languages
• transfer learning
• Common Voice
• big data