Abstract

Recognition of spoken names is an important ASR task since many speech applications can be associated with it. However, the task is also among the most difficult ones due to the large number of names, their varying origins, and the multiple valid pronunciations of any given name, largely dependent upon the speaker’s mother tongue and familiarity with the name. In order to explore the speaker‐ and language‐dependent pronunciation variability issues present in name pronunciation, a spoken name database was collected from 101 speakers with varying native languages. Each speaker was asked to pronounce 80 polysyllabic names, uniformly chosen from ten language origins. In preliminary experiments, various prosodic features were used to train Gaussian mixture models (GMMs) to identify misplaced syllabic emphasis within the name, at roughly 85% accuracy. Articulatory features (voicing, place, and …

Date

2004

Authors

Joseph Tepperman, Shrikanth Narayanan

Journal

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America

Volume

116

Issue

4_Supplement

Pages

2480-2480

Publisher

Acoustical Society of America