ISCA Archive Interspeech 2009
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2009

Porting an european portuguese broadcast news recognition system to brazilian portuguese

Alberto Abad, Isabel Trancoso, Nelson Neto, M. Céu Viana

This paper reports on recent work in the context of the activities of the PoSTPort project aimed at porting a Broadcast News recognition system originally developed for European Portuguese to other varieties. Concretely, in this paper we have focused on porting to Brazilian Portuguese. The impact of some of the main sources of variability has been assessed, besides proposing solutions at the lexical, acoustic and syntactic levels. The ported Brazilian Portuguese Broadcast News system allowed a drastic performance improvement from 56.6% WER (obtained with the European Portuguese system) to 25.5%.