System and method for increasing recognition rates of in-vocabulary words by improving pronunciation modeling

Abstract

Disclosed herein are systems, methods, and computer readable-media for generating a lexicon for use with speech recognition. The method includes receiving symbolic input as labeled speech data, overgenerating potential pronunciations based on the symbolic input, identifying best potential pronunciations in a speech recognition context, and storing the identified best potential pronunciations in a lexicon. Overgenerating potential pronunciations can include establishing a set of conversion rules for short sequences of letters, converting portions of the symbolic input into a number of possible lexical pronunciation variants based on the set of conversion rules, modeling the possible lexical pronunciation variants in one of a weighted network and a list of phoneme lists, and iteratively retraining the set of conversion rules based on improved pronunciations. Symbolic input can include multiple examples of a same spoken word. Speech data can be labeled explicitly or implicitly and can include words as text and recorded audio.

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