In this paper, we propose a method for generating a pronunciation dictionary - extracting typical pronunciations for each word from speech data uttered by Japanese speakers - as one approach to speech recognition targeting English speech uttered by Japanese speakers whose mother tongue is not English. This method includes three processes: a process in which English phoneme HMMs (Hidden Markov Models) are adapted to the speaker using English speech uttered by a Japanese speaker; a process in which English by a Japanese speaker is translated into an English phoneme series using a phoneme typewriter; and a process by which representative phoneme series are selected with a clustering technique from multiple phoneme series derived with respect to each word. We also propose a speaker adaptation method in a recognition phase. In this method, the phoneme HMMs are adapted to the target speaker with a phoneme label series that expresses the typical pronunciation extracted using the above method. Evaluation tests by continuous speech recognition with English speech data uttered by five Japanese speakers using a pronunciation dictionary generated from other five Japanese speakers' data were carried out. The result of the tests indicated that sentence recognition errors were reduced by 72% compared to using a dictionary for native speakers.
Cite as: Suzuki, T., Ishii, J., Nakajima, K. (2000) A method of generating English pronunciation dictionary for Japanese English recognition systems. Proc. 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 2000), vol. 3, 634-637, doi: 10.21437/ICSLP.2000-615
@inproceedings{suzuki00b_icslp,
author={Tadashi Suzuki and Jun Ishii and Kunio Nakajima},
title={{A method of generating English pronunciation dictionary for Japanese English recognition systems}},
year=2000,
booktitle={Proc. 6th International Conference on Spoken Language Processing (ICSLP 2000)},
pages={vol. 3, 634-637},
doi={10.21437/ICSLP.2000-615}
}