In the past, fundamental linguistic research was typically conducted on small data sets that were handcrafted for the specific research at hand. However, from the eighties onwards, many large spoken language corpora have become available. This study investigates the usefulness of large multi-purpose spoken language corpora for fundamental linguistic research. A research task was designed in whi...

The main problems of a conversational Russian speech recognition system development are variability of pronunciation, free word-order in sentences and presence of speech disfluencies. In the paper, pronunciation variability is modeled by creation of multiple word transcriptions. A syntacticstatistical language model that takes into account long-distant word dependencies is proposed for Russian ...

In this paper, we present our latest investigations on pronunciation modeling and its impact on ASR. We propose completely automatic methods to detect, remove, and substitute inconsistent or flawed entries in pronunciation dictionaries. The experiments were conducted on different tasks, namely (1) word-pronunciation pairs from the Czech, English, French, German, Polish, and Spanish Wiktionary [...

English pronunciation studies the techniques of uttering words, making it one most challenging subjects and considered a formality. By mastering proper pronunciation, there will be no miscommunication when speaking with others or native speakers. Learning from speaker creates benchmark for appropriately pronouncing words. Unfortunately, is overpriced impractical. Therefore, this study developed...

Pronunciation variations in spontaneous speech can be classified into complete changes and partial changes. A complete change is the replacement of a canonical phoneme by another alternative phone, such as ‘b’ being pronounced as ‘p’. Partial changes are variations within the phoneme such as nasalization, centralization and voiced. Most current work in pronunciation modeling for spontaneous Man...

Automatic and accurate pronunciation of personal names by parametric speech synthesizer has become a crucial limitation for applications within the telecommunications industry, since the technology is needed to provide new automated services such as reverse directory assistance (number to name). Within text-to-speech technology, however, it was not possible to offer such functionality. This was...

This study investigates whether a computer assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) system can help young learners improve word-level pronunciation skills in English as a foreign language at a level comparable to that achieved through traditional teacher-led training. The pronunciation improvement of a group of learners of 11 years of age receiving teacher-fronted instruction was compared to that...