Automatic Phonetic Baseform Determination

Lalit R. Bahl, Subrata K. Das, Peter DeSouza, M. Epstein, Robert L. Mercer, Bernard Mérialdo, David Nahamoo, Michael Picheny, J. Powell

Abstract: The authors describe a series of experiments in which the phonetic baseform is deduced automatically for new words by utilizing actual utterances of the new word in conjunction with a set of automatically derived spelling-to-sound rules. Recognition performance was evaluated on new words spoken by two different speakers when the phonetic baseforms were extracted via the above approach. The error rates on these new words were found to be comparable to or better than when the phonetic baseforms were derived by hand, thus validating the basic approach. >