Publication Details

Title: Lexical Modeling in a Speaker Independent Speech Understanding System
Author: C. C. Wooters
Group: ICSI Technical Reports
Date: November 1993
PDF: ftp://ftp.icsi.berkeley.edu/pub/techreports/1993/tr-93-068.pdf

Overview:
This thesis presents an algorithm for the construction of models that attempt to capture the variation that occurs in the pronunciations of words in spontaneous (i.e., non-read) speech. A technique for developing alternate pronunciations of words and then estimating the probabilities of the alternate pronunciations is presented. Additionally, we describe the development and implementation of a spoken-language understanding system called the Berkeley Restaurant Project (BeRP). Multiple pronunciation word models constructed using the algorithm proposed in this thesis are evaluated within the context of the BeRP system. The results of this evaluation show that the explicit modeling of variation in the pronunciation of words improves the performance of both the speech recognition and the speech understanding components of the BeRP system.

Bibliographic Information:
ICSI Technical Report TR-93-068

Bibliographic Reference:
C. C. Wooters. Lexical Modeling in a Speaker Independent Speech Understanding System. ICSI Technical Report TR-93-068, November 1993