Projection of the corpus for the speech recognition service from standard French to French regional accents in field of French media

Amel Mhamdi

Abstract

Standard French means French pronounced without any regional accent and whose syntax, morphology and spelling are described in dictionaries, grammar books and textbooks. Although standard French is taught at school and used in written communication, administrative documentation and Radio/TV national channels, most of regional and local Radio/TV channels as well as specific shows promoting touristic areas can typically carry out regional French accents. In this work, we focus on the problem of speech recognition service for the French media. Our goal is to build useful resources to extend language models that can be used in speech recognition APIs. Over the past few years, the APIs for automated speech recognition (ASR) are playing an increasing crucial role for a variety of media applications. In this paper, we present a lightweight open source framework STT-FTV that allows users to easily connect 4 different ASR tools to be trained with different French regional accents. The speech corpus has been collected and transcribed from various TV and radio contents especially fit in order to represent the major differences with the standard French. This STT-FTV system offers a relative reduction of the Word Error Rate in the context of regional accent transcription.

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