AccentDB: A Database of Non-Native English Accents to Assist Neural Speech Recognition

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 5351–5358 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 5351 AccentDB: A Database of Non-Native English Accents to Assist Neural Speech Recognition Afroz Ahamad*†, Ankit Anand*, Pranesh Bhargava BITS Pilani, India {afrozsahamad, ankit0905anand}@gmail.com pranesh@hyderabad.bits-pilani.ac.in Abstract Modern Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) technology has evolved to identify the speech spoken by native speakers of a language very well. However, identification of the speech spoken by non-native speakers continues to be a major challenge for it. In this work, we first spell out the key requirements for creating a well-curated database of speech samples in non-native accents for training and testing robust ASR systems. We then introduce AccentDB, one such database that contains samples of 4 Indian-English accents collected by us, and a compilation of samples from 4 native-English, and a metropolitan Indian-English accent. We also present an analysis on separability of the collected accent data. Further, we present several accent classification models and evaluate them thoroughly against human-labelled accent classes. We test the generalization of our classifier models in a variety of setups of seen and unseen data. Finally, we introduce the task of accent neutralization of non-native accents to native accents using autoencoder models with task-specific architectures. Thus, our work aims to aid ASR systems at every stage of development with a database for training, classification models for feature augmentation, and neutralization systems for acoustic transformations of non-native accents of English. Keywords: Speech Resource/Database, Prosody, Speech Recognition/Understanding 1. Introduction In Sociolinguistics, accent is a manner of pronouncing a language. Anyone who speaks a language, does so in an ac- cent. The way the native speakers of a language speak that language defines the standard pronunciation, and is gener- ally considered to be the standard or reference accent for that language. When the non-native speakers of a language speak that language, say an Indian person speaking English, the phonological requirement of the non-native language, in this case English, interacts with the phonological knowl- edge of their first language, say Hindi. This influences their manner of speaking, giving rise to what is considered as the non-native accent. Accents per se are interesting because they refer to a wide variety of social issues such as the acceptance of speakers into a community, indication of class in society, and lin- guistic issues such as those pertaining to the phonology of languages. This in itself warrants a better understanding of accents. However, there is another fundamental reason for studying accents. Speakers always have a manner of speak- ing and the speech always has accent. Since spoken com- munication is an important form of communication, study- ing accents becomes important to design technologies built to interact with human speech. 1.1. Indian Accents in English Internet has led to English language becoming the lingua- franca for conveying information about science, culture, sports and society in the world. The continued advance- ments in technologies supporting speech, in the form of audio …

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