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Poster
in
Workshop: The Fourth Workshop on Efficient Natural Language and Speech Processing (ENLSP-IV): Highlighting New Architectures for Future Foundation Models

Mai Ho`omāuna i ka `Ai: Language Models Improve Automatic Speech Recognition in Hawaiian

Kaavya Chaparala · Guido Zarrella · Bruce Torres Fischer · Larry Kimura · Oiwi Parker Jones

Keywords: [ Data Efficiency ]


Abstract:

In this paper we address the challenge of improving Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for a low-resource language, Hawaiian, by incorporating large amounts of independent text data into an ASR foundation model, Whisper. To do this, we train an external language model (LM) on ∼1.5M words of Hawaiian text. We then use the LM to rescore Whisper and compute word error rates (WERs) on a manually curated test set of labeled Hawaiian data. As a baseline, we use Whisper without an external LM. Experimental results reveal a small but significant improvement in WER when ASR outputs are rescored with a Hawaiian LM. The results support leveraging all available data in the development of ASR systems for underrepresented languages.

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