What are the models used for the baseline of the three NLP tasks?
For speech synthesis, they build a speech clustergen statistical speech synthesizer BIBREF9. For speech recognition, they use Kaldi BIBREF11. For Machine Translation, they use a Transformer architecture from BIBREF15.
We present a resource for computational experiments on Mapudungun, a polysynthetic indigenous language spoken in Chile with upwards of 200 thousand speakers. We provide 142 hours of culturally significant conversations in the domain of medical treatment. The conversations are fully transcribed and translated into Spanish. The transcriptions also include annotations for code-switching and non-standard pronunciations. We also provide baseline results on three core NLP tasks: speech recognition, speech synthesis, and machine translation between Spanish and Mapudungun. We further explore other applications for which the corpus will be suitable, including the study of code-switching, historical orthography change, linguistic structure, and sociological and anthropological studies.
Recent years have seen unprecedented progress for Natural Language Processing (NLP) on almost every NLP subtask. Even though low-resource settings have also been explored, this progress has overwhelmingly been observed in languages with significant data resources that can be leveraged to train deep neural networks. Low-resource languages still lag behind. Endangered languages pose an additional challenge. The process of documenting an endangered language typically includes the creation of word lists, audio and video recordings, notes, or grammar fragments, with the created resources then stored in large online linguistics archives. This process is often hindered by the Transcription Bottleneck: the linguistic fieldworker and the language community may not have time to transcribe all of the recordings and may only transcribe segments that are linguistically salient for publication or culturally significant for the creation of community resources. With this work we make publicly available a large corpus in Mapudungun, a language of the indigenous Mapuche people of southern Chile and western Argentina. We hope to ameliorate the resource gap and the transcription bottleneck in two ways. First, we are providing a larger data set than has previously been available, and second, we are providing baselines for NLP tasks (speech recognition, speech synthesis, and machine translation). In providing baselines and datasets splits, we hope to further facilitate research on low-resource NLP for this language through our data set. Research on low-resource speech recognition is particularly important in relieving the transcription bottleneck, while tackling the research challenges that speech synthesis and machine translation pose for such languages could lead to such systems being deployed to serve more under-represented communities.