2025.emnlp-main.1600@ACL

Total: 1

#1 Towards Language-Agnostic STIPA: Universal Phonetic Transcription to Support Language Documentation at Scale [PDF] [Copy] [Kimi] [REL]

Authors: Jacob Lee Suchardt, Hana El-Shazli, Pierluigi Cassotti

This paper explores the use of existing state-of-the-art speech recognition models (ASR) for the task of generating narrow phonetic transcriptions using the International Phonetic Alphabet (STIPA). Unlike conventional ASR systems focused on orthographic output for high-resource languages, STIPA can be used as a language-agnostic interface valuable for documenting under-resourced and unwritten languages. We introduce a new dataset for South Levantine Arabic and present the first large-scale evaluation of STIPA models across 51 language families. Additionally, we provide a use case on Sanna, a severely endangered language. Our findings show that fine-tuned ASR models can produce accurate IPA transcriptions with limited supervision, significantly reducing phonetic error rates even in extremely low-resource settings. The results highlight the potential of STIPA for scalable language documentation.

Subject: EMNLP.2025 - Main