Modeling Pronunciation Variation for Automatic Speech Recognition

Rolduc, The Netherlands
May 4-6, 1998

Pronunciation Variants Across Systems, Languages and Speaking Style

Martine Adda-Decker, Lori Lamel

Spoken Language Processing Group, LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France

This contribution aims at evaluating the use of pronunciation variants across different system configurations, languages and speaking styles. This study is limited to the use of variants during speech alignment, given an orthographic transcription and a phonemically represented lexicon, thus focusing on the modeling abilities of the acoustic word models. Parallel and sequential variants are tested in order to measure the spectral and temporal modeling accuracy. As a preliminary step we investigated the dependance of the aligned variants on the recognizer configuration. A cross-lingual study was carried out for read speech in French and American English using the BREF and the WSJ corpora. A comparison between read and spontaneous speech is presented for French based on alignments from BREF (read) and MASK (spontaneous) data.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Adda-Decker, Martine / Lamel, Lori (1998): "Pronunciation variants across systems, languages and speaking style", In MPV-1998, 1-6.