Combined Systems for Automatic Phonetic Transcription of Proper Nouns

Antoine Laurent, Téva Merlin, Sylvain Meignier, Yannick Estève, Paul Deléglise

Abstract
Large vocabulary automatic speech recognition (ASR) technologies perform well in known, controlled contexts. However recognition of proper nouns is commonly considered as a difficult task. Accurate phonetic transcription of a proper noun is difficult to obtain, although it can be one of the most important resources for a recognition system. In this article, we propose methods of automatic phonetic transcription applied to proper nouns. The methods are based on combinations of the rule-based phonetic transcription generator LIA_PHON and an acoustic-phonetic decoding system. On the ESTER corpus, we observed that the combined systems obtain better results than our reference system (LIA_PHON). The WER (Word Error Rate) decreased on segments of speech containing proper nouns, without affecting negatively the results on the rest of the corpus. On the same corpus, the Proper Noun Error Rate (PNER, which is a WER computed on proper nouns only), decreased with our new system.
Anthology ID:
L08-1479
Volume:
Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08)
Month:
May
Year:
2008
Address:
Marrakech, Morocco
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis, Daniel Tapias
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
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Pages:
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/455_paper.pdf
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Antoine Laurent, Téva Merlin, Sylvain Meignier, Yannick Estève, and Paul Deléglise. 2008. Combined Systems for Automatic Phonetic Transcription of Proper Nouns. In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'08), Marrakech, Morocco. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Combined Systems for Automatic Phonetic Transcription of Proper Nouns (Laurent et al., LREC 2008)
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http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2008/pdf/455_paper.pdf
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