Paper ID: 2404.03073

Mai Ho'om\=auna i ka 'Ai: Language Models Improve Automatic Speech Recognition in Hawaiian

Kaavya Chaparala, Guido Zarrella, Bruce Torres Fischer, Larry Kimura, Oiwi Parker Jones

In this paper we address the challenge of improving Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) for a low-resource language, Hawaiian, by incorporating large amounts of independent text data into an ASR foundation model, Whisper. To do this, we train an external language model (LM) on ~1.5M words of Hawaiian text. We then use the LM to rescore Whisper and compute word error rates (WERs) on a manually curated test set of labeled Hawaiian data. As a baseline, we use Whisper without an external LM. Experimental results reveal a small but significant improvement in WER when ASR outputs are rescored with a Hawaiian LM. The results support leveraging all available data in the development of ASR systems for underrepresented languages.

Submitted: Apr 3, 2024