Speech And Language Technologies For Low Resource Languages

AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION and TRANSLATION for LOW-RESOURCE LANGUAGES This book is a comprehensive exploration into the cutting-edge research, methodologies, and advancements in addressing the unique challenges associated with ASR and translation for low-resource languages. Automatic Speech Recognition and Translation for Low Resource Languages contains groundbreaking research from experts and researchers sharing innovative solutions that address language challenges in low-resource environments. The book begins by delving into the fundamental concepts of ASR and translation, providing readers with a solid foundation for understanding the subsequent chapters. It then explores the intricacies of low-resource languages, analyzing the factors that contribute to their challenges and the significance of developing tailored solutions to overcome them. The chapters encompass a wide range of topics, ranging from both the theoretical and practical aspects of ASR and translation for low-resource languages. The book discusses data augmentation techniques, transfer learning, and multilingual training approaches that leverage the power of existing linguistic resources to improve accuracy and performance. Additionally, it investigates the possibilities offered by unsupervised and semi-supervised learning, as well as the benefits of active learning and crowdsourcing in enriching the training data. Throughout the book, emphasis is placed on the importance of considering the cultural and linguistic context of low-resource languages, recognizing the unique nuances and intricacies that influence accurate ASR and translation. Furthermore, the book explores the potential impact of these technologies in various domains, such as healthcare, education, and commerce, empowering individuals and communities by breaking down language barriers. Audience The book targets researchers and professionals in the fields of natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech technology. It will also be of interest to engineers, linguists, and individuals in industries and organizations working on cross-lingual communication, accessibility, and global connectivity.

This book constitutes refereed proceedings from the First International Conference on Speech and Language Technologies for Low-resource Languages, SPELLL 2022, held in Kalavakkam, India, in November 2022. The 25 presented papers were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 70 submissions. The papers are organised in the following topical sections: ​language resources; language technologies; speech technologies; multimodal data analysis; fake news detection in low-resource languages (regional-fake); low resource cross-domain, cross-lingualand cross-modal offensie content analysis (LC4).

This book constitutes refereed proceedings from the First International Conference on Speech and Language Technologies for Low-resource Languages, SPELLL 2022, held in Kalavakkam, India, in November 2022. The 25 presented papers were thoroughly reviewed and selected from 70 submissions. The papers are organised in the following topical sections: language resources; language technologies; speech technologies; multimodal data analysis; fake news detection in low-resource languages (regional-fake); low resource cross-domain, cross-lingualand cross-modal offensie content analysis (LC4).

This book constitutes the refereed conference proceedings of the second International Conference on Speech and Language Technologies for Low-Resource Languages, SPELLL 2023, held in Perundurai, Erode, India, during December 6–8, 2023. The 27 full papers and 6 short papers presented in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 94 submissions. The papers are divided into the following topical sections: language resources; language technologies; speech technologies; and workshops - regional fake, MMLOW, LC4.

This book addresses state-of-the-art systems and achievements in various topics in the research field of speech and language technologies. Book chapters are organized in different sections covering diverse problems, which have to be solved in speech recognition and language understanding systems. In the first section machine translation systems based on large parallel corpora using rule-based and statistical-based translation methods are presented. The third chapter presents work on real time two way speech-to-speech translation systems. In the second section two papers explore the use of speech technologies in language learning. The third section presents a work on language modeling used for speech recognition. The chapters in section Text-to-speech systems and emotional speech describe corpus-based speech synthesis and highlight the importance of speech prosody in speech recognition. In the fifth section the problem of speaker diarization is addressed. The last section presents various topics in speech technology applications like audio-visual speech recognition and lip reading systems.

This book focuses on methods that are unsupervised or require minimal supervision—vital in the low-resource domain. Over the past few years, rapid growth in Internet access across the globe has resulted in an explosion in user-generated text content in social media platforms. This effect is significantly pronounced in linguistically diverse areas of the world like South Asia, where over 400 million people regularly access social media platforms. YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter report a monthly active user base in excess of 200 million from this region. Natural language processing (NLP) research and publicly available resources such as models and corpora prioritize Web content authored primarily by a Western user base. Such content is authored in English by a user base fluent in the language and can be processed by a broad range of off-the-shelf NLP tools. In contrast, text from linguistically diverse regions features high levels of multilinguality, code-switching, and varied language skill levels. Resources like corpora and models are also scarce. Due to these factors, newer methods are needed to process such text. This book is designed for NLP practitioners well versed in recent advances in the field but unfamiliar with the landscape of low-resource multilingual NLP. The contents of this book introduce the various challenges associated with social media content, quantify these issues, and provide solutions and intuition. When possible, the methods discussed are evaluated on real-world social media data sets to emphasize their robustness to the noisy nature of the social media environment. On completion of the book, the reader will be well-versed with the complexity of text-mining in multilingual, low-resource environments; will be aware of a broad set of off-the-shelf tools that can be applied to various problems; and will be able to conduct sophisticated analyses of such text.

In our increasingly interconnected world, low-resource languages face the threat of oblivion. These linguistic gems, often spoken by marginalized communities, are at risk of fading away due to limited data and resources. The neglect of these languages not only erodes cultural diversity but also hinders effective communication, education, and social inclusion. Academics, practitioners, and policymakers grapple with the urgent need for a comprehensive solution to preserve and empower these vulnerable languages. Empowering Low-Resource Languages With NLP Solutions is a pioneering book that stands as the definitive answer to the pressing problem at hand. It tackles head-on the challenges that low-resource languages face in the realm of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Through real-world case studies, expert insights, and a comprehensive array of topics, this book equips its readers—academics, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers—with the tools, strategies, and ethical considerations needed to address the crisis facing low-resource languages.