Improving ASR performance on Jasmin Flemish Dutch data by performing frequency perturbation

ASR (automatic speech recognition) systems are used widely in our current day and age. However, for a technology that is used so much in our daily life it contains a lot of bias. This means that not all people can use it equally, people with a different gender, age and dialect will all see different results. The goal of this paper is to reduce...

Evaluating the Effect of SpecSwap for Purposes of Improving WER Performance of the Western Dutch Region Using the JASMIN-CGN Dataset

A problem prevalent in many modern-day Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems is the presence of bias and its reduction. Bias can be observed when an ASR system performs worse on a subset of its speakers compared to the rest rather than having the same overall generalization for everyone. This can be seen by using Word Error Rates (WER) as a...

Improving Northern Regional Dutch Speech Recognition by Adapting Perturbation-based Data Augmentation

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) does not perform equally well on every speaker. There is bias against many attributes, including accent. To train Dutch ASR, there exists CGN(Corpus Gesproken Nederlands) and as an extension, the JASMIN corpus with annotated accented data. This paper focuses on improving ASR performance for NRAD (Northern...

Evaluating the Use of Pitch Shifting to Improve Automatic Speech Recognition Performance on Southern Dutch Accents

Building Automatic Speech Recognizers (ASRs) has been a challenge in languages with insufficiently sized corpora or data sets. A further large issue in language corpora is biases against regionally accented speech and other speaker attributes. There are some techniques to improve ASR performance and reduce biases in these corpora, known as data...

Evaluating the Use of Frequency Masking on a Hybrid Automatic Speech Recognizer for Transitional Dutch Accent of JASMIN-CGN Corpus

There are many experiments conducted with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems, but many either focus on specific speaker categories or on a language in general. Therefore, bias could occur in such ASR systems towards different genders, age groups, or dialects. But, to analyze and reduce bias, the models require significant amounts of data...