Automatic speech recognition for an under-resourced language - amharic

In this paper we present the development of an Automatic Speech Recognition System (ASRS) for Amharic using limited available resources and the freely available speech toolkit (HTK). There are phonological, dialectal, orthographic and morphological features of Amharic that challenge the development of ASRSs. The problem of resource scarcity is also a hindrance to the research and development initiatives in the area of Amharic ASR. Dealing with these language and resource related problems, we have developed syllableand triphone-based ASR for Amharic and achieved 90.43% and 91.31% word recognition accuracy, respectively, on the evaluation test set of 5k vocabulary.