This study aims to investigate the current conditions of pronunciation teaching and learning in a local university through a questionnaire. The subjects majoring in English Education agree that accuracy rather than intelligibility should be adopted as the criterion for English teachers. Though the importance of pronunciation is well recognized by the subjects, instruction lags far behind the le...

This paper presents the design and performance of a Malay grapheme to phoneme (G2P) tool for generating the pronunciation dictionary for a Malay automatic speech recognition system (ASR). The G2P tool is a rule based system. It is flexible in adding and removing rules, and handling of English words. The G2P tool also contains morphological and syllable tool, which it uses to determine the pronu...

We propose a model-driven method for ensuring the quality of pronunciation dictionaries. The key ingredient is computing an alignment between letter strings and phoneme strings, a standard technique in pronunciation modeling. The novel aspect of our method is the use of informative, parametric alignment models which are refined iteratively as they are tested against the data. We discuss the use...

This paper describes the implementation of a full-scale pronunciation lexicon for Turkish using finite state technology. The system produces at its output, a parallel representation of the pronunciation and the morphological analysis of the word form so that morphological disambiguation can be used to disambiguate pronunciation. The pronunciation representation is based on the SAMPA standard an...

2 Individual Pronunciation Coaching The difficulties experienced while learning the pronunciation of a second language do not only depend on the mother tongue of the learners but also on individual differences between learners. Even students of the same mother tongue and with a very similar learning background show huge differences in their individual pronunciation. Learners also differ in term...

Modeling pronunciation variation is key for recognizing conversational speech. Previous efforts on pronunciation modeling by modifying dictionaries only yielded marginal improvement. Due to complex interaction between dictionaries and acoustic models, we believe a pronunciation modeling scheme is plausible only when closely coupled with the underlying acoustic model. This paper explores the use...

We describe a new language-independent technique for automatically identifying errors in an electronic pronunciation dictionary by analyzing the source of conflicting patterns directly. We evaluate the effectiveness of the technique in two ways: we perform a controlled experiment using artificially corrupted data (allowing us to measure precision and recall exactly); and then apply the techniqu...

In this paper, we propose speaker-dependent multiple-pronunciation lexical modeling for improving the performance of dysarthric automatic speech recognition (ASR). For each dysarthric speaker, a phoneme confusion matrix is first constructed from the results of phoneme recognition. Then, pronunciation variation rules are extracted by investigating the phoneme confusion matrix, and they are incor...

In this paper, a data-driven approach to statistical modeling pronunciation variation is proposed. It consists of learning stochastic pronunciation rules. The proposed method jointly models different rules that define the same transformation. Hierarchic Grouping Rule Inference (HIEGRI) algorithm is proposed to generate this model based on graphs. HIEGRI algorithm detects the common patterns of ...

The ultimate aim of the research reported on here is to develop an automatic testing system for Dutch pronunciation. In the experiment described in this paper automatic scores of telephone speech produced by native and non-native speakers of Dutch are compared with speci®c, i.e., temporal and segmental, and global pronunciation ratings assigned by three groups of experts: three phoneticians and...