Pronunciation Variants Across Systems, Languages and Speaking Style

This contribution aims at evaluating the use of pronunciation variants across different system configurations, languages and speaking styles. This study is limited to the use of variants during speech alignment, given an orthographic transcription and a phonemically represented lexicon, thus focusing on the modeling abilities of the acoustic word models. Parallel and sequential variants are tested in order to measure the spectral and temporal modeling accuracy. As a preliminary step we investigated the dependance of the aligned variants on the recognizer configuration. A crosslingual study was carried out for read speech in French and American English using the BREF and the WSJ corpora. A comparison between read and spontaneousspeech is presented for French based on alignments from BREF (read) and MASK (spontaneous) data.