BACKGROUND Mounting evidence suggests that holding multiple concurrent jobs in public and private (dual practice) is common among health workers in low- as well as high-income countries. Nurses are world's largest health professional workforce and a critical resource for achieving Universal Health Coverage. Nonetheless, little is known about nurses' engagement with dual practice. METHODS We c...

In this paper we examine an alternative interface for phonetic search, namely query-by-example, that avoids OOV issues associated with both standard word-based and phonetic search methods. We develop three methods that compare query lattices derived from example audio against a standard ngrambased phonetic index and we analyze factors affecting the performance of these systems. We show that the...

Phonetic decision trees have been widely used for obtaining robust context-dependent models in HMM-based systems. There are five key issues to consider when constructing phonetic decision trees: the alignment of data with the chosen phone classes; the quality of the modeling of the underlying data; the choice of partitioning method at each node; the goodness-of-split criterion and the method fo...

Dutch schwa-epenthesis in liquid+consonant clusters has been the subject of a “boundary dispute”, as to its phonetic or phonological status. There has been surprisingly little instrumental work on the phenomenon that could function as an arbiter in this dispute. This paper attempts to remedy this situation by bringing results from a corpus of sociophonetic variation data to bear on the issue, f...

In this paper, accent issues are discussed for Shanghai-accented Mandarin speech recognition. The phonetic confusion is analyzed in detail based on the alignment between the surface form and the baseform transcriptions. Mutual information is used as the measure to extract the most confusing phoneme pairs. It was found that each phoneme in one pair can be easily misrecognized with the other. To ...

We introduce phylogenetic and areal language features to the domain of multilingual text-to-speech synthesis. Intuitively, enriching the existing universal phonetic features with crosslingual shared representations should benefit the multilingual acoustic models and help to address issues like data scarcity for low-resource languages. We investigate these representations using the acoustic mode...

Some of the speech databases and large spoken language corpora that have been collected during the last fifteen years have been (at least partly) annotated with a broad phonetic transcription. Such phonetic transcriptions are often validated in terms of their resemblance to a handcrafted reference transcription. However, there are at least two methodological issues questioning this validation m...

Previous research has demonstrated that English /r/ is perceptually more dissimilar from Japanese /r/ than English /l/ is for native Japanese (NJ) speakers. It has been proposed by the Speech Learning Model that the more distant an L2 sound (phonetic segment) is from the closest L1 speech sound, the more learnable the L2 sound will be (in: W. Strange (Ed.), Speech Perception and Linguistic Expe...