European Portuguese Accent in Acoustic Models for Non-native English Speakers

The development of automatic speech recognition systems poses several known difficulties. One of them concerns the recognizer’s accuracy when dealing with non-native speakers of a given language. Normally a recognizer precision is lower for non-native users, hence our goal is to improve this low accuracy rate when the speech recognition system is confronted with a foreign accent. A typical usage scenario is to apply these models in applications where European Portuguese is dominant, but where English may also frequently occur. Therefore, several experiments were performed using cross-word triphone based models, which were then trained with speech corpora containing European Portuguese native speakers, English native speakers and English spoken by European Portuguese native speakers.