Phonologically Informed Tokenization for German Speech Recognition: A Cross-Domain Study

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2610.11646v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: German is a morphologically rich language whose syllable structure is exceptionally well-predicted by the Knuth--Liang hyphenation algorithm. We ask whether phonologically informed tokenization can serve as a competitive target for end-to-end speech recognition. We compare three tokenizer families on the Omnilingual ASR wav2vec 2.0 backbone fine-tuned with CTC: the pretrained multilingual character inventory, a data-driven Byte-Pair Encoding (BPE) over orthography, and phonologically informed units from Pyphen syllabification and grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. Across 40 fine-tunes, we evaluate on three German test sets spanning orthogonal shifts: in-domain read speech, dialectal spontaneous speech, and standard-German spontaneous speech. In-