Uyghur morpheme-based language models and ASR

Uyghur language is an agglutinative language in which words are formed by suffixes attaching to a stem (or root). Because of the explosive nature in vocabulary of the agglutinative languages, several morpheme-based language models are built and experiments are implemented. Morpheme is the smallest meaning bearing unit. In this research, morpheme is referred to any of prefix, stem, or suffix. As a result, a large vocabulary ASR system is built on the basis of Julius system. Several ASR results on language models based on different units (word, morpheme, and syllable) are compared.