Dialectal Speech Recognition and Translation of Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text: Microsoft's Submission to SwissText 2021

Abstract: This paper describes the winning approach in the Shared Task 3 at SwissText 2021 on Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text, a public competition on dialect recognition and translation. Swiss German refers to the multitude of Alemannic dialects spoken in the German-speaking parts of Switzerland. Swiss German differs significantly from standard German in pronunciation, word inventory and grammar. It is mostly incomprehensible to native German speakers. Moreover, it lacks a standardized written script. To solve the challenging task, we propose a hybrid automatic speech recognition system with a lexicon that incorporates translations, a 1st pass LLM that deals with Swiss German particularities, a transfer-learned acoustic model and a strong neural LLM for 2nd pass rescoring. Our submission reaches 46.04% BLEU on a blind conversational test set and outperforms the second best competitor by a 12% relative margin.