Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition for Nepali Language

Abstract

Speech Recognition is a widely studied topic for high-resource languages like English and Mandarin. A plethora of publications exist that study the performance of several recognition methods for these languages. However differences in phonetics, accent, language model, etc between any two different languages demand for a study of speech recognition methodologies and components separately for each language. In this paper, we present a comparative study of popular speech recognition methods for Nepali, a low-resource Indo-Aryan language. We describe our approach to building the phonetic dictionary and present our findings for DNN and GMM based techniques with speaker adaptation on 50K vocabulary speech recognition task.