The application of deep learning to automatic speech recognition (ASR) has yielded dramatic accuracy increases for languages with abundant training data, but languages with limited training resources have yet to see accuracy improvements on this scale. In this paper, we compare a fully convolutional approach for acoustic modelling in ASR with a variety of established acoustic modeling approaches. We evaluate our method on Seneca, a low-resource endangered language spoken in North America. Our method yields word error rates up to 40% lower than those reported using both standard GMM-HMM approaches and established deep neural methods, with a substantial reduction in training time. These results show particular promise for languages like Seneca that are both endangered and lack extensive documentation.

Despite recent advances in natural language processing and other language technology, the application of such technology to language documentation and conservation has been limited. In August 2019, a workshop was held at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA to attempt to bring together language community members, documentary linguists, and technologists to discuss how to bridge this gap and create prototypes of novel and practical language revitalization technologies. The workshop focused on developing technologies to aid language documentation and revitalization in four areas: 1) spoken language (speech transcription, phone to orthography decoding, text-to-speech and text-speech forced alignment), 2) dictionary extraction and management, 3) search tools for corpora, and 4) social media (language learning bots and social media analysis). This paper reports the results of this workshop, including issues discussed, and various conceived and implemented technologies for nine languages: Arapaho, Cayuga, Inuktitut, Irish Gaelic, Kidaw’ida, Kwak’wala, Ojibwe, San Juan Quiahije Chatino, and Seneca.

Many clinical assessment instruments used to diagnose language impairments in children include a task in which the subject must formulate a sentence to describe an image using a specific target word. Because producing sentences in this way requires the speaker to integrate syntactic and semantic knowledge in a complex manner, responses are typically evaluated on several different dimensions of appropriateness yielding a single composite score for each response. In this paper, we present a dataset consisting of non-clinically elicited responses for three related sentence formulation tasks, and we propose an approach for automatically evaluating their appropriateness. We use neural machine translation to generate correct-incorrect sentence pairs in order to create synthetic data to increase the amount and diversity of training data for our scoring model. Our scoring model uses transfer learning to facilitate automatic sentence appropriateness evaluation. We further compare custom word embeddings with pre-trained contextualized embeddings serving as features for our scoring model. We find that transfer learning improves scoring accuracy, particularly when using pretrained contextualized embeddings.