Creating Spoken Dialog Systems in Ultra-Low Resourced Settings

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems are a crucial technology that is used today to design a wide variety of applications, most notably, smart assistants, such as Alexa. ASR systems are essentially dialogue systems that employ Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) to extract meaningful information from speech. The main challenge with designing such systems is that they require a huge amount of labeled clean data to perform competitively, such data is extremely hard to collect and annotate to respective SLU tasks, furthermore, when designing such systems for low resource languages, where data is extremely limited, the severity of the problem intensifies. In this paper, we focus on a fairly popular SLU task, that is, Intent Classification while working with a low resource language, namely, Flemish. Intent Classification is a task concerned with understanding the intents of the user interacting with the system. We build on existing light models for intent classification in Flemish, and our main contribution is applying different augmentation techniques on two levels -- the voice level, and the phonetic transcripts level -- to the existing models to counter the problem of scarce labeled data in low-resource languages. We find that our data augmentation techniques, on both levels, have improved the model performance on a number of tasks.