Evaluating grapheme-to-phoneme converters in automatic speech recognition context

International audienceThis paper deals with the evaluation of grapheme-to-phoneme (G2P) converters in a speech recognition context. The precision and recall rates are investigated as potential measures of the quality of the multiple generated pronunciation variants. Very different results are obtained whether or not we take into account the frequency of occurrence of the words. Since G2P systems are rarely evaluated on a speech recognition performance basis, the originality of this paper consists in using a speech recognition system to evaluate the G2P pronunciation variants. The results show that the training process is quite robust to some errors in the pronunciation lexicon, whereas pronunciation lexicon errors are harmful in the decoding process. Noticeable speech recognition performance improvements are achieved by combining two different G2P converters, one based on conditional random fields and the other on joint multigram models, as well as by checking the pronunciation variants of the most frequent words

Adaptive Statistical Utterance Phonetization for French

International audienceTraditional utterance phonetization methods concatenate pronunciations of uncontextualized constituent words. This approach is too weak for some languages, like French, where transitions between words imply pronunciation modifications. Moreover, it makes it difficult to consider global pronunciation strategies, for instance to model a specific speaker or a specific accent. To overcome these problems, this paper presents a new original phonetization approach for French to generate pronunciation variants of utterances. This approach offers a statistical and highly adaptive framework by relying on conditional random fields and weighted finite state transducers. The approach is evaluated on a corpus of isolated words and a corpus of spoken utterances

Rapid Generation of Pronunciation Dictionaries for new Domains and Languages

This dissertation presents innovative strategies and methods for the rapid generation of pronunciation dictionaries for new domains and languages. Depending on various conditions, solutions are proposed and developed. Starting from the straightforward scenario in which the target language is present in written form on the Internet and the mapping between speech and written language is close up to the difficult scenario in which no written form for the target language exists