Description:

This branch contains the working code for the master's project focusing on language representation and modelling for Swiss German ASR (2019/2020).

The scripts are an implementation of a basic ASR framework based on Kaldi and were originally developed by Spitch AG, with the following functionality:

• Neural networks acoustic model training.
• WFST lingware compilation.
• Evaluation.

The Kaldi (version 5.5.) recipe egs/wsj/s5 (commit 8cc5c8b32a49f8d963702c6be681dcf5a55eeb2e) was used as reference.

Main scripts:

run_archimob.sh: acoustic model training

run_archimob.sh <archimob_input_csv> <archimob_wav_files_directory> <am_output_directory> <transcription_type> <pronunciation_lexicon>

compile_and_decode.sh: lingware compilation and validation

compile_and_decode.sh <arpa_lm> <am_output_directory> <archimob_dev_csv> <archimob_wav_files_directory> <lw_output_directory> <transcription_type> <lmwt_params> <flexwer_mapping>

evaluate.sh: test set decoding and evaluation

./evaluate.sh <archimob_test_csv> <archimob_wav_files_directory> <am_output_directory> <lw_output_directory> <eval_output_directory> <lmwt> <transcription_type> <flexwer_mapping>

Configuration:

path.sh: script to specify the Kaldi root directory and to add certain directories to the path.

cmd.sh: script to select the way of running parallel jobs.

Folders:

Framework specific:

archimob: scripts related to processing the Archimob files for word-level modelling.

archimob_char: scripts related to processing the Archimob files for character-level modelling.

uzh: secondary scripts not included in the Kaldi recipe.

manual: manually generated files.

doc: documentation files.

lms: scripts for compiling language models

scripts: small scripts for processing different parts of ArchiMob and Kaldi outputs

experiments: Makefiles containing commands for exectuing experiments (e.g. training AMs, compiling WFSTs and evaluating)

Kaldi:

conf: configuration files

local: original recipe-specific files from egs/wsj/s5

utils: utilities shared among all the Kaldi recipes

steps: general scripts related to the different steps followed in the Kaldi recipes

---

Steps for running experiment on dialectial (Dieth) transcriptions

1. To generate original lexicon from a csv file:

First, extract Dieth transcription utterances from train.csv (possibly also dev.csv/test.csv)

python ./archimob/process_archimob_csv.py \
-i ../data/archimob_r2/train.csv \
-trans orig \
-t ../processed/dieth/dieth_trans.txt

Then create lexicon by mapping grapheme clusters to phones symbols (according to Fran's original approach)

python ./archimob/create_simple_lexicon.py \
-v ../processed/dieth/dieth_trans.txt \
-c manual/clusters.txt \
-o ../processed/dieth/dieth_lexicon.txt

2. Train AMs

bash ./run_archimob.sh \
../data/archimob_r2/train.csv \
../data/archimob_r2/chunked_wav_files \
../processed/dieth/am_out \
'orig' \
../processed/dieth/dieth_lexicon.txt

3. Compile WFST and decode on validation set to get best WIP and LMWT

• NB. This step assumes a pre-computed LM in .arpa format (as produced by SRILM/MITLM), e.g., ../lms/dieth/mitlm_mkn_3.arpa.
• NB. If mapping of normalised to dieth wordforms is available, include it as the last argument for computing FlexWER.

bash ./compile_and_decode.sh \
../lms/dieth/mitlm_mkn_3.arpa \
../processed/dieth/am_out \
../data/archimob_r2/dev.csv \
../data/archimob_r2/chunked_wav_files \
../processed/dieth/lw_out/ \
orig \
"--min-lmwt 5 --max-lmwt 20" \
../data/archimob_r2/norm2dieth_clean.json

4. Decoding test set and evaluating performance

• NB. Specify best LMWT according to validation set decoding explicitly (in this example, 11)
• NB. If mapping of normalised to dieth wordforms is available, include it as the last argument for computing FlexWER.

bash ./evaluate.sh \
../data/archimob_r2/test.csv \
../data/archimob_r2/chunked_wav_files \
../processed/dieth/am_out \
../processed/dieth/lw_out/ \
../processed/dieth/eval_out/ \
11 \
orig \
../data/archimob_r2/norm2dieth_clean.json

---

Steps for running experiment on normalised transcriptions

Steps are largely the same as above. The main differences include: - lexicon generation - language model training - for all basic commands, the <transcription_type> argument must be norm, not orig - no surface-level mapping for FlexWER evaluations

Useful tips for working with normalised transcriptions:

• ensure that the csv has been normalised to remove unwanted diacrtitics (e.g. 'õ', 'ã', etc.)
• ensure that input lexicon has been extended to cover as many in-vocabulary words as possible

Example call for AM training:

bash ./run_archimob.sh \
../data/archimob_r2/train.csv \
../data/archimob_r2/chunked_wav_files \
../norm/am_out \
'norm' \
../processed/norm/extended_lexicon.txt

---

Updated 25/07/2020