Speech Transcription Challenges for Resource Constrained Indigenous Language Cree
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Cree is one of the most spoken Indigenous languages in Canada. From a speech recognition perspective, it is a low-resource language, since very little data is available for either acoustic or language modeling. This has prevented development of speech technology that could help revitalize the language. We describe our experiments with available Cree data to improve automatic transcription both in speaker- independent and dependent scenarios. While it was difficult to get low speaker-independent word error rates with only six speakers, we were able to get low word and phoneme error rates in the speaker-dependent scenario. We compare our phoneme recognition with two state-of-the-art open-source phoneme recognition toolkits, which use end-to-end training and sequence-to-sequence modeling. Our phoneme error rate (8.7%) is significantly lower than that achieved by the best of these systems (15.1%). With these systems and varying amounts of transcribed and text data, we show that pre-training on other languages is important for speaker-independent recognition, and even small amounts of additional text-only documents are useful. These results can guide practical language documentation work, when deciding how much transcribed and text data is needed to achieve useful phoneme accuracies.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".