Spoken term discovery for language documentation using translations

Abstract

Vast amounts of speech data collected for language documentation and research remain untranscribed and unsearchable, but often a small amount of speech may have text translations available. We present a method for partially labeling additional speech with translations in this scenario. We modify an unsupervised speech-totranslation alignment model and obtain prototype speech segments that match the translation words, which are in turn used to discover terms in the unlabelled data. We evaluate our method on a Spanish- English speech translation corpus and on two corpora of endangered languages, Arapaho and Ainu, demonstrating its appropriateness and applicability in an actual very-low-resource scenario.