Abstract

We present first results from our efforts in automatically increasing and adapting phonetic dictionaries for spontaneous speech recognition. Spontaneous speech adds a variety of phenomena to a speech recognition task: false starts [1], human and nonhuman noises [2], new words [3] and alternative pronunciations. All of these phenomena have to be tackled when adapting a speech recognition system for spontaneous speech. For phonetic dictionaries (especially for spontaneous speech) it is important to choose the pronunciations of a word according to the frequency in which they appear in the database rather than the "correct" pronunciation as it might be found in a lexicon. Additionally modifications of the dictionary should not lead to a higher phoneme confusability. Therefore we propose a data-driven approach to add new pronunciations to a given phonetic dictionary, in a way that they model the given occurrences of words in the database. We show how even a simple approach can lead to signi...

Citations

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