First Steps in Fast Acoustic Modeling for a New Target Language: Application to Vietnamese

This paper presents our first steps in fast acoustic modeling for a new target language. Both knowledge-based and data-driven methods were used to obtain phone mapping tables between a source language (French) and a target language (Vietnamese). While acoustic models borrowed directly from the source language did not perform very well, we have shown that using a small amount of adaptation data in the target language (one or two hours) lead to very acceptable automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance. Our best continuous Vietnamese recognition system, adapted with only two hours of Vietnamese data, obtains a word accuracy of 63.9% on one hour of Vietnamese speech dialog for instance.