(Academy of Science of South Africa, 2014) Kamper, Herman; Niesler, Thomas R.
For successful deployment, a South African English speech recognition system must be capable of
processing the prevalent accents in this variety of English. Previous work dealing with the different accents
of South African English has considered the case in which the accent of the input speech is known. Here we
focus on the practical scenario in which the accent of the input speech is unknown and accent identification
must occur at recognition time. By means of a set of contrastive experiments, we determine the effect
which errors in the identification of the accent have on speech recognition performance. We focus on the
specific configuration in which a set of accent-specific speech recognisers operate in parallel, thereby
delivering both a recognition hypothesis as well as an identified accent in a single step. We find that, despite
their considerable number, the accent identification errors do not lead to degraded speech recognition
performance. We conclude that, for our South African English data, there is no benefit of including a more
complex explicit accent identification component in the overall speech recognition system.