Pronunciation Modeling and Lexicon Adaptation for Spoken Language Technology (PMLA)

September 14-15, 2002
Aspen Lodge, Estes Park, Colorado, USA

Pronunciation Variation Modelling in a Model of Human Word Recognition

Odette Scharenborg, Lou Boves

A2RT, Department of Language and Speech, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Due to pronunciation variation, many insertions and deletions of phones occur in spontaneous speech. The psycholinguistic model of human speech recognition Shortlist is not well able to deal with phone insertions and deletions and is therefore not well suited for dealing with real-life input. The research presented in this paper explains how Shortlist can benefit from pronunciation variation modelling in dealing with real-life input.

Pronunciation variation was modelled by including variants into the lexicon of Shortlist. A series of experiments was carried out to find the optimal acoustic model set for transcribing the training material that was used as basis for the generation of the variants.

The Shortlist experiments clearly showed that Shortlist benefits from pronunciation variation modelling. However, the performance of Shortlist stays far behind the performance of other, more conventional speech recognisers.


Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Scharenborg, Odette / Boves, Lou (2002): "Pronunciation variation modelling in a model of human word recognition", In PMLA-2002, 65-70.