Mići Princ -- A Little Boy Teaching Speech Technologies the Chakavian Dialect
This work provides a valuable resource for AI and dialectal research on the endangered Chakavian dialect, though it is incremental in applying existing methods to new data.
The authors created a computer-readable dataset of The Little Prince translated into the Chakavian dialect, with aligned text and audio, and adapted the Whisper-large-v3 speech recognition model to this dialect, reducing word error rate by half and character-level error by up to two-thirds.
This paper documents our efforts in releasing the printed and audio book of the translation of the famous novel The Little Prince into the Chakavian dialect, as a computer-readable, AI-ready dataset, with the textual and the audio components of the two releases now aligned on the level of each written and spoken word. Our motivation for working on this release is multiple. The first one is our wish to preserve the highly valuable and specific content beyond the small editions of the printed and the audio book. With the dataset published in the CLARIN.SI repository, this content is from now on at the fingertips of any interested individual. The second motivation is to make the data available for various artificial-intelligence-related usage scenarios, such as the one we follow upon inside this paper already -- adapting the Whisper-large-v3 open automatic speech recognition model, with decent performance on standard Croatian, to Chakavian dialectal speech. We can happily report that with adapting the model, the word error rate on the selected test data has being reduced to a half, while we managed to remove up to two thirds of the error on character level. We envision many more usages of this dataset beyond the set of experiments we have already performed, both on tasks of artificial intelligence research and application, as well as dialectal research. The third motivation for this release is our hope that this, now highly structured dataset, will be transformed into a digital online edition of this work, allowing individuals beyond the research and technology communities to enjoy the beauty of the message of the little boy in the desert, told through the spectacular prism of the Chakavian dialect.