Comparing mono- multilingual acoustic seed models for a low e-resourced language: a case-study of Luxembourgish

摘要

Luxembourgish is embedded in a multilingual context on the divide between Romance and Germanic cultures and has often been viewed as one of Europe's under-resourced languages. We focus on the acoustic modeling of Luxembourgish. By taking advantage of monolingual acoustic seeds selected from German, French or English model sets via IPA symbol correspon-dances, we investigated whether Luxembourgish spoken words were globally better represented by one of these languages. Although speech in Luxembourgish is frequently interspersed with French words, forced alignments on these data showed a clear preference for Germanic acoustic models with only a limited usage of French. German models provided the best match with 54% of the data, 35% for English and only 11 % for French models. A set of multilingual acoustic models, estimated the pooled German, French, and English audio data, captured 27% to 48% of the data depending on conditions.