Pronunciation-Based Asr For Names

To improve the ASR of proper names a novel method based on the generation of pronunciation variants by means of phoneme-to-phoneme converters (P2Ps) is proposed. The aim is convert baseline transcriptions into variants that maximally resemble actual name pronunciations that were found in a training corpus. The method has to operate in a cross lingual setting with native Dutch persons speaking Dutch and foreign names, and foreign persons speaking Dutch names. The P2Ps are trained to act either on conventional G2P-transcriptions or on canonical transcriptions that were provided by a human expert. Including the variants produced by the P2Ps in the lexicon of the recognizer substantially improves the recognition accuracy for natives pronouncing foreign names, but not for the other investigated combinations.