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Leveraging Speech Models for Audio-based Lexical Retrieval in Dictionaries: The Case of the Teochew Language

This study presents our attempt on applying Query by Example - Spoken Term Detection methodologies to a real-world, low-resource scenario: building an audio-based query functionality for the diasporan Teochew dictionary WhatTCSay. This functionality enables users to retrieve dictionary entries without prior knowledge of the writing systems in Teochew, thereby enhancing the accessibility of the dictionary and facilitating language revitalization efforts within Teochew communities. To address the retrieval task, we investigate two approaches: (i) an ASR-based approach using text-to-text matching, and (ii) a Dynamic Time Warping (DTW)-based acoustic framework for audio-to-audio retrieval. In the first approach, we compare an automatic romanization of the spoken query against the gold romanization from the dictionary; in the second, we directly match the user’s spoken query against audio recordings from the dictionary pronounced by a native speaker. Retrieval performance is evaluated using recall at rank k. Results show that text-to-text matching achieves better performance than audio-to-audio matching; however, the two approaches were not optimized under fully comparable conditions, as the ASR-based approach benefited from additional optimization, which was not equally available for the DTW method.