Pronunciation Modeling and Lexicon Adaptation for Spoken Language Technology (PMLA) September 14-15, 2002 Aspen Lodge, Estes Park, Colorado, USA

Lexicon Adaptation for LVCSR: Speaker Idiosyncracies, Non-Native Speakers, and Pronunciation Choice

Wayne Ward (1), Holly Krech (1), Xiuyang Yu (1), Keith Herold (1), George Figgs (1), Ayako Ikeno (1), Dan Jurafsky (1), William Byrne (2)

(1) Center for Spoken Language Research, University of Colorado, Boulder
(2)Center for Language and Speech Research, The Johns Hopkins University

We report on our preliminary experiments on building dynamic lexicons for native-speaker conversational speech and for foreign-accented conversational speech. Our goal is to build a lexicon with a set of pronunciations for each word, in which the probability distribution over pronunciation is dynamically computed. The set of pronunciations are derived from hand-written rules (for foreign accent) or clustering (for phonetically-transcribed Switchboard data). The dynamic pronunciation-probability will take into account specific characteristics of the speaker as well as factors such as language-model probability, disfluencies, sentence position, and phonetic context. This work is in a relatively preliminary stage.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Ward, Wayne / Krech, Holly / Yu, Xiuyang / Herold, Keith / Figgs, George / Ikeno, Ayako / Jurafsky, Dan / Byrne, William (2002): "Lexicon adaptation for LVCSR: speaker idiosyncracies, non-native speakers, and pronunciation choice", In PMLA-2002, 83-88.