All pronunciation dictionaries make use of abbreviatory conventions to save space. Devices such as italicization, superscription, and parenthesization make it possible to cater for several different phonetic forms without retranscribing the whole of the variant pronunciation. The three currently available pronunciation dictionaries of English are EPD, LPD and ODP. They all exploit the possibili...

â â â  avicenna and the arabic phonetics â â â â â  * mahmood shakib ansari â  * * alireza yusofi â â â  abstract â  avicenna, the iranian philosopher and sage, mostly famous for his scientific works such as law and the shifa has done some studies in arabic phonetics as well. besides pointing to some physical aspects of sounds in the above mentioned books, he has also written a monograph in ara...

Compared to traditional language education methodologies, CALL systems have many potential benefits. CALL systems are faster and cheaper which allow learners to get feedback immediately and study by themselves without requiring the sole attention of a teacher. In CALL systems, a good pronunciation evaluation method is needed to inform learners about their proficiency and to correct their pronun...

In this work, we define a measure aimed at assessing how well a pronunciation model will function when used as a component of a speech recognition system. This measure, pronunciation entropy, fuses information from both the pronunciation model and the language model. We show how to compute this score by effectively composing the output of a phoneme recognizer with a pronunciation dictionary and...

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 ...

A significant source of variation in spontaneous speech is due to intra-speaker pronunciation changes. Previous work in automatic speech recognition has identified several factors that affect pronunciation variability such as phonetic context and speaking rate. This work examines new higher level information sources: syntax and discourse structure, specifically the relationship between these fa...

1 Introduction In addition to the existing computer programs that have been designed specifically for foreign language pronunciation (or intonation) training, a number of software packages are available today that can be used in phonetics classes, although they have not been developed for this particular purpose. The aim of this paper is to briefly analyse a speech recognition program and to co...

The current emphasis in second language teaching lies in the achievement of communicative effectiveness. In line with this approach, pronunciation training is nowadays geared towards helping learners avoid serious pronunciation errors, rather than eradicating the finest traces of foreign accent. However, to devise optimal pronunciation training programmes, systematic information on these pronun...