Transcription of Russian conversational speech

This paper presents initial work in transcribing conversational telephone speech in Russian. Acoustic seed models were derived from other languages. The initial studies are carried out with 9 hours of transcribed data, and explore the choice of the phone set and use of other data types to improve transcription performance. Discriminant features produced by a Multi Layer Perceptron trained on a few hours of Russian conversational data are contrasted with those derived from well-trained networks for English telephone speech and from Russian broadcast data. Acoustic models trained on broadcast data filtered to match the telephone band achieve results comparable to those obtained with models trained on the small conversation telephone speech corpus.