This paper introduces a novel approach for generating multilingual text-to-phoneme mappings for use in multilingual speech recognition systems. The multilingual mappings are based on the weighted outputs from a neural network text-to-phoneme model, trained on data mixed from several languages. The multilingual mappings used together with a branched grammar decoding scheme is able to capture both inter- and intra-language pronunciation variations which is ideal for multilingual speaker independent speech recognition systems. A significant improvement in overall system performance was obtained for a multilingual speaker independent name dialing task when applying multilingual instead of language dependent text-to-phoneme mapping.

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Bibliographic reference.  Riis, Søren Kamaric / Pedersen, Morten With / Jensen, Kare Jean (2001): "Multilingual text-to-phoneme mapping", In EUROSPEECH-2001, 1441-1444.