lex4all: A language-independent tool for building and evaluating pronunciation lexicons for small-vocabulary speech recognition

Anjana Sofia Vakil, Max Paulus, Alexis Palmer, Michaela Regneri

Abstract: This paper describes lex4all, an opensource PC application for the generation and evaluation of pronunciation lexicons in any language. With just a few minutes of recorded audio and no expert knowledge of linguistics or speech technology, individuals or organizations seeking to create speech-driven applications in lowresource languages can build lexicons enabling the recognition of small vocabularies (up to 100 terms, roughly) in the target language using an existing recognition engine designed for a high-resource source language (e.g. English). To build such lexicons, we employ an existing method for cross-language phoneme-mapping. The application also offers a built-in audio recorder that facilitates data collection, a significantly faster implementation of the phoneme-mapping technique, and an evaluation module that expedites research on small-vocabulary speech recognition for low-resource languages.