A bottom-up method for obtaining information about pronunciation variation

In this paper a Bottom-Up (BU) method of obtaining information about pronunciation variation is proposed. BU transcriptions (Tbu) were obtained by letting a CSR decide for each phone whether it was deleted or not. The Tbu were compared to transcriptions obtained automatically with a TopDown method, and the agreement appeared to be very high. Subsequently, the Tbu were aligned with canonical reference transcriptions (Tref) and on the basis of this alignment, deletion rules were derived. The BU rules were employed to generate variants which were used in recognition experiments. The results of these recognition experiments show that the information about pronunciation variation obtained using the BU method can be used to improve recognition performance.