Caballero-Morales Santiago-Omar
Technological University of the Mixteca, Road to Acatlima K.m. 2.5, 69000 Huajuapan de León, OAX, Mexico.
ScientificWorldJournal. 2013 Apr 16;2013:170649. doi: 10.1155/2013/170649. Print 2013.
The Mixtec language is one of the main native languages in Mexico. In general, due to urbanization, discrimination, and limited attempts to promote the culture, the native languages are disappearing. Most of the information available about the Mixtec language is in written form as in dictionaries which, although including examples about how to pronounce the Mixtec words, are not as reliable as listening to the correct pronunciation from a native speaker. Formal acoustic resources, as speech corpora, are almost non-existent for the Mixtec, and no speech technologies are known to have been developed for it. This paper presents the development of the following resources for the Mixtec language: (1) a speech database of traditional narratives of the Mixtec culture spoken by a native speaker (labelled at the phonetic and orthographic levels by means of spectral analysis) and (2) a native speaker-adaptive automatic speech recognition (ASR) system (trained with the speech database) integrated with a Mixtec-to-Spanish/Spanish-to-Mixtec text translator. The speech database, although small and limited to a single variant, was reliable enough to build the multiuser speech application which presented a mean recognition/translation performance up to 94.36% in experiments with non-native speakers (the target users).
米斯特克语是墨西哥主要的本土语言之一。总体而言，由于城市化、歧视以及推广该文化的尝试有限，本土语言正在逐渐消失。关于米斯特克语的现有信息大多以书面形式呈现，如字典中的内容，尽管字典包含了米斯特克语单词发音的示例，但不如从母语者那里听到正确发音可靠。对于米斯特克语来说，像语音语料库这样的正式声学资源几乎不存在，也没有已知的针对该语言开发的语音技术。本文介绍了为米斯特克语开发的以下资源：(1) 一个由母语者讲述的米斯特克文化传统故事的语音数据库（通过频谱分析在语音和正字法层面进行标注），以及 (2) 一个与米斯特克语到西班牙语/西班牙语到米斯特克语文本翻译器集成的母语者自适应自动语音识别（ASR）系统（使用语音数据库进行训练）。该语音数据库虽然规模较小且仅限于单一变体，但足够可靠以构建多用户语音应用程序，在针对非母语者（目标用户）的实验中，该应用程序的平均识别/翻译性能高达94.36%。
