IE-CPS Lexicon: An Automatic Speech Recognition Oriented Indian-English Pronunciation Dictionary
Shelly Jain, Aditya Yadavalli, Ganesh Mirishkar, Chiranjeevi Yarra, Anil Kumar Vuppala
Abstract
Indian English (IE), on the surface, seems quite similar to standard English. However, closer observation shows that it has actually been influenced by the surrounding vernacular languages at several levels from phonology to vocabulary and syntax. Due to this, automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems developed for American or British varieties of English result in poor performance on Indian English data. The most prominent feature of Indian English is the characteristic pronunciation of the speakers. The systems are unable to learn these acoustic variations while modelling and cannot parse the non-standard articulation of non-native speakers. For this purpose, we propose a new phone dictionary developed based on the Indian language Common Phone Set (CPS). The dictionary maps the phone set of American English to existing Indian phones based on perceptual similarity. This dictionary is named Indian English Common Phone Set (IE-CPS). Using this, we build an Indian English ASR system and compare its performance with an American English ASR system on speech data of both varieties of English. Our experiments on the IE-CPS show that it is quite effective at modelling the pronunciation of the average speaker of Indian English. ASR systems trained on Indian English data perform much better when modelled using IE-CPS, achieving a reduction in the word error rate (WER) of upto 3.95% when used in place of CMUdict. This shows the need for a different lexicon for Indian English.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.icon-main.24
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON)
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- National Institute of Technology Silchar, Silchar, India
- Editors:
- Sivaji Bandyopadhyay, Sobha Lalitha Devi, Pushpak Bhattacharyya
- Venue:
- ICON
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- NLP Association of India (NLPAI)
- Note:
- Pages:
- 195–204
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.icon-main.24
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Shelly Jain, Aditya Yadavalli, Ganesh Mirishkar, Chiranjeevi Yarra, and Anil Kumar Vuppala. 2021. IE-CPS Lexicon: An Automatic Speech Recognition Oriented Indian-English Pronunciation Dictionary. In Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Natural Language Processing (ICON), pages 195–204, National Institute of Technology Silchar, Silchar, India. NLP Association of India (NLPAI).
- Cite (Informal):
- IE-CPS Lexicon: An Automatic Speech Recognition Oriented Indian-English Pronunciation Dictionary (Jain et al., ICON 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2021.icon-main.24.pdf
- Data
- LibriSpeech