» Automatic Generation of Pronunciation Lexicons for Mandarin Spontaneous Speech

William Byrne1, Veera Venkataramani1, Terri Kamm1, Tom Zheng2, Zhanjiang Song2, Pascale Fung3, Liu Yi3, and Umar Ruhi4

1 CLSP/ECE, The Johns Hopkins University , Baltimore MD, USA

2 Dept. CST, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

3 Dept. EEE, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong

4 Dept. CS, University of Toronto, Canada

Presented: May 2001.

Pronunciation modeling for large vocabulary speech recognition attempts to improve recognition accuracy by identifying and modeling pronunciations that are not in the ASR systems pronunciation lexicon. Pronunciation variability in spontaneous Mandarin is studied using the newly created CASS corpus of phonetically annotated spontaneous speech. Pronunciation modeling techniques developed for English are applied to this corpus to train pronunciation models which are then used for Mandarin Broadcast News transcription.