Recognition of foreign names spoken by native speakers

It is a challenge to develop a speech recognizer that can handle the kind of lexicons encountered in an automatic attendant or car navigation application. Such lexicons can contain several 100K entries, mainly proper names. Many of these names are of a foreign origin, and native speakers can pronounce them in different ways, ranging from a completely nativized to a completely foreignized pronunciation. In this paper we propose a method that tries to deal with the observed pronunciation variability by introducing the concept of a foreignizable phoneme, and by combining standard acoustic models with a phonologically inspired back-off acoustic model. The main advantage of the approach is that it does not require any foreign phoneme models nor foreign speech data. For the recognition of English names by means of Dutch acoustic models, we obtained a reduction of the word error rate by more than 10% relative

How speaker tongue and name source language affect the automatic recognition of spoken names

In this paper the automatic recognition of person names and geographical names uttered by native and non-native speakers is examined in an experimental set-up. The major aim was to raise our understanding of how well and under which circumstances previously proposed methods of multilingual pronunciation modeling and multilingual acoustic modeling contribute to a better name recognition in a cross-lingual context. To come to a meaningful interpretation of results we have categorized each language according to the amount of exposure a native speaker is expected to have had to this language. After having interpreted our results we have also tried to find an answer to the question of how much further improvement one might be able to attain with a more advanced pronunciation modeling technique which we plan to develop

Essential Speech and Language Technology for Dutch: Results by the STEVIN-programme

Computational Linguistics; Germanic Languages; Artificial Intelligence (incl. Robotics); Computing Methodologie