EUROSPEECH 2003 - INTERSPEECH 2003 8th European Conference on Speech Communication and Technology Geneva, Switzerland September 1-4, 2003

Validation of Phonetic Transcriptions Based on Recognition Performance

Christophe van Bael (1), Diana Binnenpoorte (1), Helmer Strik (1), Henk van den Heuvel (2)

(1) University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands
(2) SPEX, The Netherlands

In fundamental linguistic as well as in speech technology research there is an increasing need for procedures to automatically generate and validate phonetic transcriptions. Whereas much research has already focussed on the automatic generation of phonetic transcriptions, far less attention has been paid to the validation of such transcriptions. In the little research performed in this area, the estimation of the quality of (automatically generated) phonetic transcriptions is typically based on the comparison between these transcriptions and a human-made reference transcription. We believe, however, that the quality of phonetic transcriptions should ideally be estimated with the application in which the transcriptions will be used in mind, provided that the application is known at validation time. The application focussed on in this paper is automatic speech recognition, the validation criterion is the word error rate. We achieved a higher accuracy with a recogniser trained on an automatically generated transcription than with a similar recogniser trained on a human-made transcription resembling a human-made reference transcription more. This indicates that the traditional validation approach may not always be the most optimal one.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Bael, Christophe van / Binnenpoorte, Diana / Strik, Helmer / Heuvel, Henk van den (2003): "Validation of phonetic transcriptions based on recognition performance", In EUROSPEECH-2003, 1545-1548.