Adapting Slovak ASR for native Germans speaking Slovak

We explore variability involved in speech with a non-native accent. We first employ a combination of knowledge-based and datadriven approaches for the analysis of pronunciation variants between L1 (German) and target L2 (Slovak). Knowledge gained in this two-step process is then used in adapting acoustic models and the lexicon. We focus on modifications in the pronunciation dictionary and speech rate. Our results show that the recognition of German-accented Slovak is significantly improved with techniques modeling slow L2 speech, and that the adaptation of the pronunciation dictionary yields only insignificant gains.