This paper addresses the problem of predicting the pronunciation of Japanese words, especially those that are newly created and therefore not in the dictionary. This is an important task for many applications including text-to-speech and text input method, and is also challenging, because Japanese kanji (ideographic) characters typically have multiple possible pronunciations. We approach this p...

This document describes the system Functional Pronunciation Dictionaries (FPD), a language-independent system for defining pronunciation lexicons. The starting point of this system is Functional Morphology (FM) [3, 2], where we asked us the question — given that we already have defined a lexical resource in FM, what would be an efficient approach to extending the lexicon with high-quality pronu...

The language acquisition consists of several parts which can not be learned independently: grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary and others. Whereas the first has to be learned interactively, lead by tutor or teacher to be efficient (e.g. by taking part in language training courses offered by language schools), vocabularies and their pronunciation can be partly learned autonomously. Language train...

various aspects of pronunciation quality and with their The aim of the research reported on here is to develop a system for automatic assessment of foreign speakers’ pronunciation of Dutch. In this paper, special attention is paid to expert ratings of pronunciation, because they are used as a reference to validate the pronunciation scores obtained automatically. It is shown that the ratings can...

Due to the large variability of pronunciation in spontaneous speech, pronunciation modeling becomes a more challenging and essential part in speech recognition. In this paper, we describe two different approaches of pronunciation modeling by using decision tree. At lexical level, a pronunciation variation dictionary is built to obtain alternative pronunciations for each word, in which each entr...

This work is part of a project aimed at developing a speech recognition system for language instruction that can assess the quality of pronunciation, identify pronunciation problems, and provide the student with accurate feedback about specific mistakes. Previous work was mainly concerned with scoring the quality of pronunciation. In this work we focus on automatic detection of mispronunciation...

We describe a technique for learning pronunciation rules based on the Version Space algorithm. In particular, we describe how to learn pronunciation rules for a representative subset of the English graphemes. We present a learning procedure called LEP-G.1 (learning to pronounce English graphemes) that learns English pronunciation rules from examples in the form of word-pronunciation pairs. With...

In this paper, we propose a method for automatically generating a pronunciation dictionary based on a pronunciation neural network that can predict plausible pronunciations (alternative pronunciations) from the canonical pronunciation. This method can generate multiple forms of alternative pronunciations using the pronunciation network for words that only occur a few times in the database and e...

It is essential for Mandarin Proficiency Test that mandarin pronunciation is graded by computer system. But it still has a lot of problems need to be solved before it reaches the level of success. This paper proposes a novel method of objective grading pronunciation. The mandarin pronunciation can be decomposed into consonant, vowel and tone. In this paper the pronunciation feature parameters a...

We describe an algorithm to learn word pronunciations from acoustic data. The algorithm jointly optimizes the pronunciation of a word using (a) the acoustic match of this pronunciation to the observed data, and (b) how “linguistically reasonable” the pronunciation is. Variations of word pronunciations in the recognition dictionary (which was created by linguists), are used to train a model of w...