Pronunciation modelling for conversational speech recognition: a status report from WS97

Author

Byrne, B. ; Finke, M. ; Khudanpur, S. ; McDonough, J. ; Nock, H. ; Riley, M. ; Saraclar, M. ; Wooters, C. ; Zavaliagkos, G.

Author_Institution

Center for Language & Speech Process., Johns Hopkins Univ., Baltimore, MD, USA

fYear

1997

fDate

14-17 Dec 1997

Firstpage

26

Lastpage

33

Abstract

Accurately modelling of pronunciation variability in conversational speech is an important component for automatic speech recognition. We describe some of the projects undertaken in this direction at WS97 [the Fifth LVCSR (large-vocabulary conversational speech recognition) Summer Workshop], held at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, in July-August 1997. We first illustrate a use of hand-labelled phonetic transcriptions of a portion of the Switchboard corpus, in conjunction with statistical techniques, to learn alternatives to canonical pronunciations of words. We then describe the use of these alternative pronunciations in a recognition experiment as well as in the acoustic training of an automatic speech recognition system. Our results show a reduction of the word error rate in both cases-0.9% without acoustic retraining and 2.2% with acoustic retraining

Keywords

learning (artificial intelligence); speech recognition; statistics; vocabulary; Switchboard corpus; acoustic retraining; acoustic training; automatic speech recognition system; canonical pronunciations; hand-labelled phonetic transcriptions; large-vocabulary conversational speech recognition; learning; pronunciation modelling; pronunciation variability; statistical techniques; word error rate; Automatic speech recognition; Decision trees; Dictionaries; Error analysis; Natural languages; Robustness; Speech processing; Speech recognition; Vegetation mapping; Vocabulary;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Automatic Speech Recognition and Understanding, 1997. Proceedings., 1997 IEEE Workshop on

Conference_Location

Santa Barbara, CA

Print_ISBN

0-7803-3698-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ASRU.1997.658973

Filename

658973