Aligning and recognizing spoken books in different varieties of Portuguese

This paper tries to present digital spoken books as a useful diagnostic tool for detecting alignment and recognition problems and for studying the porting of these technologies to different varieties of the same language Portuguese, in our case. We summarize the main differences between European and Brazilian Portuguese (EP/BP) and describe how they affect the GtoP system. Despite the small size of our parallel spoken book corpus in the two varieties, our preliminary experiments confirmed our expectations in terms of the effectiveness of an EP-trained aligner used on BP spoken books. They also confirmed the inadequacy of an EP Broadcast News recognizer tested over literary contents, and the expected degradation in recognition scores caused by using that recognizer on a BP spoken book. Pronunciation adaptation was tested by adding variants derived by the BP GtoP system to our EP lexicon, resulting in a very small improvement in terms of recognition scores.