Preliminary Experiments on Unsupervised Word Discovery in Mboshi

Pierre Godard (1) , Gilles Adda (1, 2) , Martine Adda-Decker (3) , Alexandre Allauzen (1) , Laurent Besacier (4, 5) , Helene Bonneau-Maynard (1) , Guy-Noël Kouarata (6) , Kevin Löser (1) , Annie Rialland (3) , François Yvon (1)

1 LIMSI - Laboratoire d'Informatique pour la Mécanique et les Sciences de l'Ingénieur
2 IMMI - Institut des Technologies Multilingues et Multimédias de l'Information
3 LPP - LPP - Laboratoire de Phonétique et Phonologie - UMR 7018
4 IUF - Institut universitaire de France
5 GETALP - Groupe d’Étude en Traduction Automatique/Traitement Automatisé des Langues et de la Parole
6 DDL - Dynamique Du Langage

The necessity to document thousands of endangered languages encourages the collaboration between linguists and computer scientists in order to provide the documentary linguistics community with the support of automatic processing tools. The French-German ANR-DFG project Breaking the Unwritten Language Barrier (BULB) aims at developing such tools for three mostly unwritten African languages of the Bantu family. For one of them, Mboshi, a language originating from the " Cu-vette " region of the Republic of Congo, we investigate unsuper-vised word discovery techniques from an unsegmented stream of phonemes. We compare different models and algorithms, both monolingual and bilingual, on a new corpus in Mboshi and French, and discuss various ways to represent the data with suitable granularity. An additional French-English corpus allows us to contrast the results obtained on Mboshi and to experiment with more data.

Mots clés: language documentation; automatic alignment; automatic transcription; machine translation; Bantu languages

Domaines: Informatique et langage [cs.CL]

Pierre Godard, Gilles Adda, Martine Adda-Decker, Alexandre Allauzen, Laurent Besacier, et al.. Preliminary Experiments on Unsupervised Word Discovery in Mboshi. Interspeech 2016, Sep 2016, San-Francisco, United States. ⟨hal-01350119⟩