Pronunciation learning for automatic speech recognition

In many ways, the lexicon remains the Achilles heel of modern automatic speech recognizers (ASRs). Unlike stochastic acoustic and language models that learn the values of their parameters from training data, the baseform pronunciations of words in an ASR vocabulary are typically specified manually, and do not change, unless they are edited by an expert. Our work presents a novel generative framework that uses speech data to learn stochastic lexicons, thereby taking a step towards alleviating the need for manual intervention and automnatically learning high-quality baseform pronunciations for words. We test our model on a variety of domains: an isolated-word telephone speech corpus, a weather query corpus and an academic lecture corpus. We show significant improvements of 25%, 15% and 2% over expert-pronunciation lexicons, respectively. We also show that further improvements can be made by combining our pronunciation learning framework with acoustic model training.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Badr, Ibrahim

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• James Glass.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/66022

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/66022