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

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

Measuring the Quality of Pronunciation Dictionaries

Matthias Wolff, Matthias Eichner, Rüdiger Hoffmann

aboratory of Acoustics and Speech Communication, Dresden University of Technology, Germany

In this paper we investigate measures for the evaluation of pronunciation dictionaries that can be used independently of the type of lexicon, the language, a specific recognizer and how the dictionary was generated. We will describe statistical measures, measures based on information theory and performance measures and give examples how these measures can be practically applied in supervision of data-driven dictionary training, selection of pronunciation variants and evaluation of the consistency of different dictionaries. Although the introduced measures are independent of the type of dictionary, we only report results obtained with a datadriven dictionary generation and do not address measures specific to rule-based approaches.


Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Wolff, Matthias / Eichner, Matthias / Hoffmann, Rüdiger (2002): "Measuring the quality of pronunciation dictionaries", In PMLA-2002, 117-122.