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Sixth International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 2000)
Beijing, China
October 16-20, 2000 |
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Investigating Text Normalization and Pronunciation Variants for German Broadcast Transcription
Martine Adda-Decker, Gilles Adda, Lori Lamel
LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay, France
In this paper we describe our ongoing work concerning lexical
modeling in the LIMSI broadcast transcription system for
German. Lexical decomposition is investigated with a twofold
goal: lexical coverage optimization and improved letter-to-sound
conversion. A set of about 450 decompounding rules, developed
using statistics from a 300M word corpus, reduces the OOV rate
from 4.5% to 4.0% on a 30k development text set. Adding partial
inflection stripping, the OOV rate drops to 2.9%. For letterto-
sound conversion, decompounding reduces cross-lexeme ambiguities
and thus contributes to more consistent pronunciation
dictionaries. Another point of interest concerns reduced pronunciation
modeling. Word error rates, measured on 1.3 hours of
ARTE TV broadcast, vary between 18 and 24% depending on the
show and the system configuration. Our experiments indicate that
using reduced pronunciations slightly decreases word error rates.
Full Paper
Bibliographic reference.
Adda-Decker, Martine / Adda, Gilles / Lamel, Lori (2000):
"Investigating text normalization and pronunciation variants for German broadcast transcription",
In ICSLP-2000, vol.1, 266-269.