ACL 2024long2 citations

Language Complexity and Speech Recognition Accuracy: Orthographic Complexity Hurts, Phonological Complexity Doesn’t

Chihiro Taguchi, David Chiang

Abstract

We investigate what linguistic factors affect the performance of Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models. We hypothesize that orthographic and phonological complexities both degrade accuracy. To examine this, we fine-tune the multilingual self-supervised pretrained model Wav2Vec2-XLSR-53 on 25 languages with 15 writing systems, and we compare their ASR accuracy, number of graphemes, unigram grapheme entropy, logographicity (how much word/morpheme-level information is encoded in the writing system), and number of phonemes. The results demonstrate that a high logographicity correlates with low ASR accuracy, while phonological complexity has no significant effect.

BibTeX
@inproceedings{taguchi-chiang-2024-language,
    title = "Language Complexity and Speech Recognition Accuracy: Orthographic Complexity Hurts, Phonological Complexity Doesn`t",
    author = "Taguchi, Chihiro  and
      Chiang, David",
    editor = "Ku, Lun-Wei  and
      Martins, Andre  and
      Srikumar, Vivek",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Bangkok, Thailand",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.827/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.827",
    pages = "15493--15503"
}