January 2014

A technology might be far from perfect, but faced with a situation having not in an emergency situation, it is better to have something than not.

Defining under-resource languages?

• The term “under-resourced languages” introduced by [Krauwer, 2003 ; Berment, 2004] refers to a language with some of (if not all) the following aspects: lack of a unique writing system or stable orthography, limited presence on the web, lack of linguistic expertise, lack of electronic resources for speech and language processing, such as monolingual corpora, bilingual electronic dictionaries, transcribed speech data, pronunciation dictionaries, vocabulary lists, etc.

Porting a system to an under resource language is still a challenge. How can you do it efficiently? What are those challenges? List them.

Is the word the best unit for language modelling? Is the phoneme the best unit for acoustic modelling?

What information must be shared between the languages? Or what is common between languages. How to determine them?

How to train systems such that they can learn the asr given than text and voice samples? How to transfer the ability to learn a voice to text mapping to other languages without the need of large amount of datasets?

Difference between morpheme and syllable?

• Morpheme and syllable represent the smallest units in a word. A morpheme is the smallest morphological unit in a word whereas syllable is the smallest speech sound in a word. Morpheme is related to the meaning and structure of a word while syllable is mainly related to the pronunciation of a word. This is the main difference between morpheme and syllable.

What is a morphological rich language?

Conclusion

Our survey and the papers in this Special Issue demonstrate that speech processing for under resourced languages is an active field of research, which has experienced significant progress during the past decade. The current review has focused on speech recognition, since that is the area which has been the most significant focus of research for these languages; however, it should be clear that many of the issues and approaches apply to speech technology in general. Although much of the recent progress has been the result of the technical developments summarized in Section 3, it is clear that organizational developments will be required to address many of the pertinent issues. In particular, progress with the smaller languages and those with extremely limited resources (such as the language mentioned in Section 5) will most likely rely on significant resource sharing; however, such sharing will benefit greatly from organizations and facilities that make it easy for researchers and technologists to access available resources in a wide range of languages. It is our hope that the current wave of interest in under-resourced languages will stimulate cooperation along these lines, along with continuing scientific research to support such languages – and, ultimately, their speakers.