Recognition of non-native accents
Carlos Teixeira, Isabel M. Trancoso, António Serralheiro · 1997
This paper deals with the problem of non-native accents in speech recognition. Reference tests were performed using whole-word and sub-word models trained either with a native accent or a pool of native and non-native accents. The results seem to indicate that the use of phonetic transcriptions for each specific accent may improve recognition scores with sub-word models. A data-driven process is used to derive transcription lattices. The recognition scores thus obtained were encouraging. 1. INTRODUCTION Our main concern in this study is to reduce the negative effects caused by non-native accents in automatic speech recognition. These effects account for a significant drop of word recognition scores when using a recogniser trained with material spoken with a native accent. Collecting large enough corpora for each non-native accent is generally not feasible. However, this problem turns out to be more complex, since even a recogniser trained with speech material from a specific non-nati...