Comparing mono- & multilingual acoustic seed models for a low e-resourced language: a case-study of luxembourgish

Luxembourgish is embedded in a multilingual context on the divide between Romance and Germanic cultures and has often been viewed as one of Europe’s under-resourced languages. We focus on the acoustic modeling of Luxembourgish. By taking advantage of monolingual acoustic seeds selected from German, French or English model sets via IPA symbol correspondances, we investigated whether Luxembourgish spoken words were globally better represented by one of these languages. Although speech in Luxembourgish is frequently interspersed with French words, forced alignments on these data showed a clear preference for Germanic acoustic models with only a limited usage of French. German models provided the best match with 54% of the data, 35% for English and only 11% for French models. A set of multilingual acoustic models, estimated the pooled German, French, and English audio data, captured 27% to 48% of the data depending on conditions.