We present our first efforts towards building a single multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) system that can process code-switching (CS) speech in five languages spoken within the same population. This contrasts with related prior work which focuses on the recognition of CS speech in bilingual scenarios. Recently, we have compiled a small five-language corpus of South African soap opera speech which contains examples of CS between 5 languages occurring in various contexts such as using English as the matrix language and switching to other indigenous languages. The ASR system presented in this work is trained on 4 corpora containing English-isiZulu, English-isiXhosa, English-Setswana and English-Sesotho CS speech. The interpolation of multiple language models trained on these language pairs enables the ASR system to hypothesize mixed word sequences from these 5 languages. We evaluate various state-of-the-art acoustic models trained on this 5-lingual training data and report ASR accuracy and language recognition performance on the development and test sets of the South African multilingual soap opera corpus.

该研究论文介绍了一种能够处理南非五种语言中发生的混合语（code-switching）的单一多语言自动语音识别系统。该系统在四个包含不同语言混合语言的语料库上进行训练，并通过语言模型的插值能够识别这五种语言的混合语，并在实验中展现出较高的准确率。

为南非语言构建一体化的语码识别系统