This paper examines the phenomenon of spelling pronunciation in Ghanaian English and shows that it has become one of the features of pronunciation that have diverged from „RP‟ (Received Pronunciation), the standard norm of English language proficiency that is taught to Ghanaians. The empirical investigation of spelling pronunciation was a selection of 50 words of English based on observation of...

Generally, a speech recognition system uses a fixed set of pronunciations according to the dictionary for training and decoding. However, even a well-defined dictionary cannot be used to support all variations in human’s pronunciation. Besides, in order to cover all possible pronunciations, the size of the dictionary would be too large to implement. This paper presents efficient strategies for ...

The pronunciation variations, which badly influenced the performance of ASR system, are serious in continuous speech, especially in spontaneous speech. Many research works are focused on pronunciation variation modeling in recent years. A framework for Chinese pronunciation variation modeling is described in this paper. The main idea is that the pronunciation variations are hidden in the recogn...

In this paper, we propose a Transformation-Based Learning (TBL) method on generating the Korean standard pronunciation. Previous studies on the phonological processing have been focused on the phonological rule applications and the finite state automata (Johnson 1984; Kaplan and Kay 1994; Koskenniemi 1983; Bird 1995). In case of Korean computational phonology, some former researches have approa...

Pronunciation, long on the periphery of applied linguistics research and pedagogy, continues to grow in importance because of its central roles in speech recognition, speech perception, and speaker identity. Pronunciation-related issues such as comprehensibility, accent, and the mutual intelligibility of varieties of world Englishes are central to many questions in applied linguistics. This cal...

This paper presents different methods of handling pronunciation variations in Cantonese large-vocabulary continuous speech recognition. In an LVCSR system, three knowledge sources are involved: a pronunciation lexicon, acoustic models and language models. In addition, a decoding algorithm is used to search for the most likely word sequence. Pronunciation variation can be handled by explicitly m...

The context in which a phoneme occurs leads to consistent differences in how it is pronounced. Phonologists employ a variety of contextual descriptors, based on factors such as stress and syllable boundaries, to explain phonological variation. However, in developing pronunciation networks for speech recognition systems, little explicit use is made of context other than the use of whole word mod...

In this paper we measure the degrees of association among aggregate pronunciational, lexical and syntactic differences in 70 Dutch dialect varieties. First, we show that pronunciation is marginally more strongly associated with syntax than it is with lexis and that syntax and lexis are only weakly associated. Then, we check for the influence of geography as an underlying factor because geograph...

In this paper, a bi-lingual large vocaburary speech recognition experiment based on the idea of modeling pronunciation variations is described. The two languages under study are Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese (Min-nan). These two languages are basically mutually unintelligible, and they have many words with the same Chinese characters and the same meanings, although they are pronounced differen...

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 [...