Basaa is one of the three Bantu languages of BULB (Breaking the Unwritten Language Barrier), a project whose aim is to provide NLP-based tools to support linguists in documenting under-resourced and unwritten languages. To develop technologies such as automatic phone transcription or machine translation, a massive amount of speech data is needed. Approximately 50 hours of Basaa speech were thus collected and then carefully re-spoken and orally translated into French in a controlled environment by a few bilingual speakers. For a subset of approx. 10 hours of the corpus, each utterance was additionally phonetically transcribed to establish a golden standard for the output of our NLP tools. The experiments described in this paper are meant to provide an automatic phonetic transcription using a set of derived phone-like units. As every language features a specific set of idiosyncrasies, automating the process of phonetic unit discovery in its entirety is a challenging task. Within BULB, we envision a workflow where linguists are able to refine the set of automatically discovered units and the system is then able to re-iterate on the data, providing a better approximation of the actual phone set.
@InProceedings{HAMLAOUI18.948, author = {Fatima Hamlaoui and Emmanuel-Moselly Makasso and Markus Müller and Jonas Engelmann and Gilles Adda and Alex Waibel and Sebastian Stüker}, title = "{BULBasaa: A Bilingual Basaa-French Speech Corpus for the Evaluation of Language Documentation Tools}", booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {May 7-12, 2018}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair) and Khalid Choukri and Christopher Cieri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Koiti Hasida and Hitoshi Isahara and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Hélène Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Takenobu Tokunaga}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {979-10-95546-00-9}, language = {english} }