ASR and Translation for Under-Resourced Languages

There are more than 6000 languages in the world but only a small number possess the resources required for implementation of human language technologies (HLT). Thus, HLT are mostly concerned by languages for which large resources are available or which have suddenly become of interest because of the economic or political scene. On the contrary, languages from developing countries or minorities have been less worked on in the past years. One way of improving this "language divide" is do more research on portability of HLT for multilingual applications. In this paper, we concentrate on speech-to-speech translation. We present here our methodology for fast development of ASR systems for under-resourced languages or, as they are called now, pi-languages (poorly equipped). We present the resources collected for Vietnamese, and the experimental results of our first Vietnamese ASR system. The current validation of our methodology for Khmer is described next. We also discuss some issues related to machine translation and present first contributions of our laboratory in this context of "pi-languages"