Czech-to-slovak adapted broadcast news transcription system

The first broadcast news (BN) transcription system for Slovak is introduced. It employs the same modules as the system we developed earlier for Czech. We utilize similarity between the two languages in efficient lexicon building, in mapping Slovak specific (rarely occurring) phonemes onto Czech ones and in low-resource cross-lingual adaptation of acoustic model. The system uses 166K-word lexicon and on the Slovak part of European COST278 BN database achieves 23.6% WER (which is only 5% less than the original, longterm optimized Czech system). Similar results were achieved also on recently recorded data from four Slovak stations.