In order to help understand why gains in pronunciation modeling have proven so elusive, we investigated which kinds of pronunciation variation are well captured by triphone models, and which are not. We do this by examining the change in behavior of a recognizer as it receives further triphone training. We show that many of the kinds of variation which previous pronunciation models attempt to c...

This paper describes the implementation of a full-scale pronunciation lexicon for Turkish using finite state technology. The system produces at its output, a parallel representation of the pronunciation and the morphological analysis of the word form so that morphological disambiguation can be used to disambiguate pronunciation. The pronunciation representation is based on the SAMPA standard an...

Modeling pronunciation variation is key for recognizing conversational speech. Previous efforts on pronunciation modeling by modifying dictionaries only yielded marginal improvement. Due to complex interaction between dictionaries and acoustic models, we believe a pronunciation modeling scheme is plausible only when closely coupled with the underlying acoustic model. This paper explores the use...

Articulatory information can support learning or remediating pronunciation of a second language (L2). This paper describes an electromagnetic articulometer-based visual-feedback approach using an articulatory target presented in real-time to facilitate L2 pronunciation learning. This approach trains learners to adjust articulatory positions to match targets for a L2 vowel estimated from product...

2 Individual Pronunciation Coaching The difficulties experienced while learning the pronunciation of a second language do not only depend on the mother tongue of the learners but also on individual differences between learners. Even students of the same mother tongue and with a very similar learning background show huge differences in their individual pronunciation. Learners also differ in term...

We describe a new language-independent technique for automatically identifying errors in an electronic pronunciation dictionary by analyzing the source of conflicting patterns directly. We evaluate the effectiveness of the technique in two ways: we perform a controlled experiment using artificially corrupted data (allowing us to measure precision and recall exactly); and then apply the techniqu...

Modeling pronunciation variation is key for recognizing conversational speech. Rather than being limited to dictionary modeling, we argue that triphone clustering is an integral part of pronunciation modeling. We propose a new approach called enhanced tree clustering. This approach, in contrast to traditional decision tree based state tying, allows parameter sharing across phonemes. We show tha...

The ultimate aim of the research reported on here is to develop an automatic testing system for Dutch pronunciation. In the experiment described in this paper automatic scores of telephone speech produced by native and non-native speakers of Dutch are compared with speci®c, i.e., temporal and segmental, and global pronunciation ratings assigned by three groups of experts: three phoneticians and...