Abstract
While the deep learning revolution has led to significant performance improvements in speech recognition, accented speech remains a challenge. Current approaches to this challenge typically do not seek to understand and provide explanations for the variations of accented speech, whether they stem from native regional variation or non-native error patterns. This paper seeks to address non-native speaker variations from both a knowledge-based and a data-driven perspective. We propose to approximate non-native accented-speech pronunciation patterns by the means of two approaches: based on phonetic and phonological knowledge on the one hand and inferred from a text-to-speech system on the other. Artificial speech is then generated with a range of variants which have been captured in confusion matrices representing phoneme similarities. We then show that non-native accent confusions actually propagate to the transcription from the ASR, thus suggesting that the inference of accent specific phoneme confusions is achievable from artificial speech.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.sigmorphon-1.6
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 20th SIGMORPHON workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Toronto, Canada
- Editors:
- Garrett Nicolai, Eleanor Chodroff, Frederic Mailhot, Çağrı Çöltekin
- Venue:
- SIGMORPHON
- SIG:
- SIGMORPHON
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 49–57
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.sigmorphon-1.6
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.sigmorphon-1.6
- Cite (ACL):
- Margot Masson and Julie Carson-berndsen. 2023. Investigating Phoneme Similarity with Artificially Accented Speech. In Proceedings of the 20th SIGMORPHON workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology, pages 49–57, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Investigating Phoneme Similarity with Artificially Accented Speech (Masson & Carson-berndsen, SIGMORPHON 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2023.sigmorphon-1.6.pdf