Word segmentation through cross-lingual word-to-phoneme alignment

Abstract

We present our new alignment model Model 3P for cross-lingual word-to-phoneme alignment, and show that unsupervised learning of word segmentation is more accurate when information of another language is used. Word segmentation with cross-lingual information is highly relevant to bootstrap pronunciation dictionaries from audio data for Automatic Speech Recognition, bypass the written form in Speech-to-Speech Translation or build the vocabulary of an unseen language, particularly in the context of under-resourced languages. Using Model 3P for the alignment between English words and Spanish phonemes outperforms a state-of-the-art monolingual word segmentation approach [1] on the BTEC corpus [2] by up to 42% absolute in F-Score on the phoneme level and a GIZA++ alignment based on IBM Model 3 by up to 17%.