Morpheme-based automatic speech recognition of basque

Abstract

In this work, we focus on studying a morpheme-based speech recognition system for Basque, an highly inflected language that is official language in the Basque Country (northern Spain). Two different techniques are presented to decompose the words into their morphological units. The morphological units are then integrated into an Automatic Speech Recognition System, and those systems are then compared to a word-based approach in terms of accuracy and processing speed. Results show that whereas the morpheme-based approaches perform similarly from an accuracy point of view, they can be significantly faster than the word-based system when applied to a weather-forecast task. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.