Modeling context and language variation for non-native speech recognition

Non-native speakers often face difficulty in pronouncing like the native speakers. This paper proposes to model pronunciation variation in non-native speaker’s speech using only acoustics models, without the need for the corpus. Variation in term of context and language will be modeled. The combination of both modeling resulted in the reduction of absolute WER as much as 16% and 6% for native Vietnamese and Chinese speakers of French.

[1]  Pascale Fung,et al.  Modeling partial pronunciation variations for spontaneous Mandarin speech recognition , 2002, Comput. Speech Lang..

[2]  Maxine Eskénazi,et al.  BREF, a large vocabulary spoken corpus for French , 1991, EUROSPEECH.

[3]  Silke M. Witt,et al.  Use of speech recognition in computer-assisted language learning , 2000 .

[4]  Keikichi Hirose,et al.  Improvement of non-native speech recognition by effectively modeling frequently observed pronunciation habits , 2003, INTERSPEECH.

[5]  Jean-François Serignat,et al.  Spoken and Written Language Resources for Vietnamese , 2004, LREC.

[6]  T. Tan A French Non-Native Corpus for Automatic Speech Recognition , 2006 .

[7]  John H. L. Hansen,et al.  Frequency characteristics of foreign accented speech , 1997, 1997 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing.

[8]  Tien Ping Tan,et al.  Acoustic Model Interpolation for Non-Native Speech Recognition , 2007, 2007 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing - ICASSP '07.

[9]  Tanja Schultz,et al.  Comparison of acoustic model adaptation techniques on non-native speech , 2003, 2003 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, 2003. Proceedings. (ICASSP '03)..

[10]  J. Flege,et al.  Amount of native-language (L1) use affects the pronunciation of an L2 , 1997 .

[11]  Pascale Fung,et al.  Multi-accent Chinese speech recognition , 2006, INTERSPEECH.

[12]  Hong Kook Kim,et al.  Acoustic Model Adaptation Based on Pronunciation Variability Analysis for Non-Native Speech Recognition , 2006, ICASSP.

[13]  Hong Kook Kim,et al.  Acoustic Model Adaptation Based on Pronunciation Variability Analysis for Non-Native Speech Recognition , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics Speech and Signal Processing Proceedings.

[14]  Eric Atwell,et al.  The ISLE Corpus of Non-Native Spoken English , 2000, LREC.

[15]  Manuela Boros,et al.  Recognition of non-native German speech with multilingual recognizers , 1999, EUROSPEECH.