Automatic phonemic transcription tools are useful for low-resource language documentation. However, due to the lack of training sets, only a tiny fraction of languages have phonemic transcription tools. Fortunately, multilingual acoustic modeling provides a solution given limited audio training data. A more challenging problem is to build phonemic transcribers for languages with zero training data. The difficulty of this task is that phoneme inventories often differ between the training languages and the target language, making it infeasible to recognize unseen phonemes. In this work, we address this problem by adopting the idea of zero-shot learning. Our model is able to recognize unseen phonemes in the target language without any training data. In our model, we decompose phonemes into corresponding articulatory attributes such as vowel and consonant. Instead of predicting phonemes directly, we first predict distributions over articulatory attributes, and then compute phoneme distributions with a customized acoustic model. We evaluate our model by training it using 13 languages and testing it using 7 unseen languages. We find that it achieves 7.7% better phoneme error rate on average over a standard multilingual model.

本研究使用零样本学习的方法解决语言无训练数据情况下语音转写的挑战，将语音音素分解成相应的发音属性，结合定制的声学模型，实现对目标语言中未知音素的识别，评估结果表明，该方法比传统多语言模型的平均音素误差率提高了7.7%。

自动音素转写的零样本学习