Speech recognition systems are conventionally broken up into phonemic acoustic models, pronouncing dictionaries in terms of the phonemic units in the acoustic model and language models in terms of lexical units from the pronouncing dictionary. Here we explore a new method for incorporating pronunciation probabilities into recognition systems by moving them from the pronouncing lexicon into the ...

Pronunciation, long on the periphery of applied linguistics research and pedagogy, continues to grow in importance because of its central roles in speech recognition, speech perception, and speaker identity. Pronunciation-related issues such as comprehensibility, accent, and the mutual intelligibility of varieties of world Englishes are central to many questions in applied linguistics. This cal...

This paper investigates whether individual speakers forming a homogeneous group differ in their choice and pronunciation of words when engaged in casual conversation, and if so, how they differ. More specifically, it examines whether the Balanced Winnow classifier is able to distinguish between the twenty speakers of the Ernestus Corpus of Spontaneous Dutch, who all have the same social backgro...

In this paper, we report our recent research aimed at improving the pronunciation-modeling component of a speech recognition system designed for mobile voice search. Our new discriminative learning technique overcomes the limitation of the traditional ways of introducing alternative pronunciations that often enlarge confusability across different lexical items. Instead, we make use of a phoneti...

Current research in the area of foreign-accented speech recognition focusses either on acoustic model adaptation or speakerdependent pronunciation variation modeling. In this paper both approaches are applied in parallel and in a speaker-independent fashion: the acoustic modeling part is based on a derived Hidden Markov Model (HMM) clustering algorithm and the lexicon adaptation is based on spe...

A method of modelling accent-specific pronunciation variations is presented. Speech from an unseen accent group is phonetically transcribed such that pronunciation variations may be derived. These context-dependent variations are clustered in decision trees which are used as a model of the pronunciation variation associated with this new accent group. The trees are then used to build a new pron...

In this paper, we propose a method for estimating a score for English pronunciation. Scores estimated by the proposed method were evaluated by correlating them with the learner’s pronunciation score which was scored by native English teachers. The average correlation between the estimated pronunciation scores and the learner’s pronunciation scores over 1, 5, and 10 sentences was 0.807, 0.873, a...

Phonetic transcriptions are often manually encoded in a pronunciation lexicon. This process is time consuming and requires linguistic expertise. Moreover, it is very difficult to maintain consistency. To handle these problems, we present a model that produces Korean pronunciation variants based on morphophonological analysis. By analyzing phonological variations frequently found in spoken Korea...

ABSTRACT In this paper, we study the usefulness of the best path and the complete trellis in dynamic programming based template matching approach for detecting pronunciation mismatch. We show that there exists cues in trellis (a matrix representing all paths), which could be exploited for detecting pronunciation mismatch. Such an approach could be used to build a template based approach for det...

Bootstrapping techniques have significant potential for the efficient generation of linguistic resources such as electronic pronunciation dictionaries. We describe a system and an approach to bootstrapping for the development of such dictionaries, and report on experiments conducted to investigate the efficiency and effectiveness of the system, focusing on the human factors that influence the p...