Automatic Recognition of Target Words in Infant-Directed Speech

Abstract

This study assesses the performance of a state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) system at extracting target words in two different speech registers: infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS). We used the Kaldi-NL ASR-service, developed by the Dutch Foundation of Open Speech Technology. The results indicate that the accuracy of the tool is much lower in IDS than in ADS. There are differences between IDS and ADS which negatively affect the performance of the existing ASR system. Therefore, new tools need to be developed for the automatic annotation of IDS. Nevertheless, the ASR system can already find more than half of the target words, which is promising.