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On the Utility of Syllable-Based Acoustic Models for Pronunciation Variation Modelling

EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing volume 2007, Article number: 046460 (2007) Cite this article

Abstract

Recent research on the TIMIT corpus suggests that longer-length acoustic models are more appropriate for pronunciation variation modelling than the context-dependent phones that conventional automatic speech recognisers use. However, the impressive speech recognition results obtained with longer-length models on TIMIT remain to be reproduced on other corpora. To understand the conditions in which longer-length acoustic models result in considerable improvements in recognition performance, we carry out recognition experiments on both TIMIT and the Spoken Dutch Corpus and analyse the differences between the two sets of results. We establish that the details of the procedure used for initialising the longer-length models have a substantial effect on the speech recognition results. When initialised appropriately, longer-length acoustic models that borrow their topology from a sequence of triphones cannot capture the pronunciation variation phenomena that hinder recognition performance the most.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for Language and Speech Technology (CLST), Faculty of Arts, Radboud University Nijmegen, P.O. Box 9103, Nijmegen, 6500 HD, The Netherlands

    Annika Hämäläinen, Lou Boves, Johan de Veth & Louis ten Bosch

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  1. Annika Hämäläinen
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  2. Lou Boves
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  3. Johan de Veth
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  4. Louis ten Bosch
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Correspondence to Annika Hämäläinen.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Hämäläinen, A., Boves, L., de Veth, J. et al. On the Utility of Syllable-Based Acoustic Models for Pronunciation Variation Modelling. J AUDIO SPEECH MUSIC PROC. 2007, 046460 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/46460

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