Fashioning Local Designs from Generic Speech Technologies in an Australian Aboriginal Community

Eric Le Ferrand, laurent besacier, Steven Bird

Abstract:

An increasing number of papers have been
addressing issues related to low-resource
languages and the transcription bottleneck
paradigm. After several years spent in Northern Australia, where some of the strongest
Aboriginal languages are spoken, we could observe a gap between the motivations depicted
in research contributions in this space and the
Northern Australian context. In this paper, we
address this gap in research by exploring the
potential of speech recognition in an Aboriginal community. We describe our work from
training a spoken term detection system to its
implementation in an activity with Aboriginal
participants. We report here on one side how
speech recognition technologies can find their
place in an Aboriginal context and, on the other,
methodological paths that allowed us to reach
better comprehension and engagement from
Aboriginal participants.