Investigating Transcription Normalization in the Faetar ASR Benchmark

Abstract: We examine the role of transcription inconsistencies in the Faetar Automatic Speech Recognition benchmark, a challenging low-resource ASR benchmark. With the help of a small, hand-constructed lexicon, we conclude that find that, while inconsistencies do exist in the transcriptions, they are not the main challenge in the task. We also demonstrate that bigram word-based language modelling is of no added benefit, but that constraining decoding to a finite lexicon can be beneficial. The task remains extremely difficult.