Recognizing English queries in Mandarin Voice Search

Recent improvements in speech recognition technology, along with increased computing power and bigger datasets, have considerably improved the state of the art in the field, making it possible for commercial apps such as Google Voice Search to serve users in their everyday mobile search needs. Deploying such systems in various countries has shown us the extent to which multilingualism is present in some cultures, and the need for better solutions to handle it in our speech recognition systems. In this paper, we describe a few early data sharing and model combination experiments we did to improve the recognition of English queries made to Mandarin Voice Search, in Taiwan. We obtained a 12% relative sentence accuracy improvement over a baseline system already including some support for English queries.