Automatic Transcription of Grammaticality Judgements for Language Documentation

Eric Le Ferrand, Emily Prud'hommeaux

Abstract:

Descriptive linguistics is a sub-field of linguistics that involves the collection and annotation
of language resources to describe linguistic phenomena. The transcription of these resources
is often described as a tedious task, and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has frequently been employed to support this process.
However, the typical research approach to ASR
in documentary linguistics often only captures
a subset of the field’s diverse reality. In this
paper, we focus specifically on one type of data
known as grammaticality judgment elicitation
in the context of documenting Kréyòl Gwadloupéyen. We show that only a few minutes
of speech is enough to fine-tune a model originally trained in French to transcribe segments
in Kréyol.