Detailed pronunciation variant modeling for speech transcription
Résumé
Modeling pronunciation variants is an important topic for automatic speech recognition. This paper investigates the pronunciation modeling at the lexical level, and presents a detailed modeling of the probabilities of the pronunciation variants. The approach is evaluated on the French ESTER2 corpus, and a significant word error rate reduction is achieved through the use of context and speaking rate dependent modeling of these pronunciation probabilities. A rule-based approach makes it possible to derive a priori probabilities for the pronunciation of words that are not present in the training corpus, and a MAP estimation process yields reliable estimates of the pronunciation variant probabilities.