A combined phonetic-phonological approach to estimating cross-language phoneme similarity in an ASR environment
Lynette Melnar, Chen Liu · 2006
This paper presents a fully automated linguistic approach to measuring distance between phonemes across languages. In this approach, a phoneme is represented by a feature matrix where feature categories are fixed, hierarchically related and binary-valued; feature categorization explicitly addresses allophonic variation and feature values are weighted based on their relative prominence derived from lexical frequency measurements. The relative weight of feature values is factored into phonetic distance calculation. Two phonological distances are statistically derived from lexical frequency measurements. The phonetic distance is combined with the phonological distances to produce a single metric that quantifies cross-language phoneme distance.