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...

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...

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...