Graphemes as basic units for crosslingual speech recognition

This paper presents our work on grapheme based crosslingual speech recognition carried out within the MASPER initiative. The performance of monolingual grapheme based acoustic models is compared to the performance of monolingual acoustic models based on phonemes. The transfer between source and target language was done using an expert knowledge approach. For the experiments, German, Spanish, Hungarian and Slovak served as source languages wheras Slovenian was the target language. All experiments are based on SpeechDat databases. The results achieved by the use of grapheme based acoustic models are comparable to the ones achieved by phoneme based acoustic models.