A small Griko-Italian speech translation corpus

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new, annotated speech corpus for the endangered language Griko, supporting computational research in low-resource language processing with baseline results for zero-resource tasks.

Contribution

It provides a detailed, annotated speech corpus for Griko, including transcriptions, translations, alignments, and pseudo-phones, facilitating research in low-resource speech processing.

Findings

Baseline results for speech-to-translation alignment

Baseline results for unsupervised word discovery

Corpus availability for research and replication

Abstract

This paper presents an extension to a very low-resource parallel corpus collected in an endangered language, Griko, making it useful for computational research. The corpus consists of 330 utterances (about 20 minutes of speech) which have been transcribed and translated in Italian, with annotations for word-level speech-to-transcription and speech-to-translation alignments. The corpus also includes morphosyntactic tags and word-level glosses. Applying an automatic unit discovery method, pseudo-phones were also generated. We detail how the corpus was collected, cleaned and processed, and we illustrate its use on zero-resource tasks by presenting some baseline results for the task of speech-to-translation alignment and unsupervised word discovery. The dataset is available online, aiming to encourage replicability and diversity in computational language documentation experiments.