Generating proper name pronunciation variants for automatic speech recognition
Katarina Bartkova · 2003
Generating correct pronunciation of proper names remains one of the most difficult tasks in text-to-phoneme transcription. Although phonetic rules can be efficient in processing proper names of one language, foreign family names cannot be always correctly generated without additional pronunciation rules. The present study addresses the problem of pronunciation variants for French and foreign family names in a French grapheme to phoneme translator. 12 language and language group filters process the names and when necessary additional, language dependent pronunciation variants are added to the basic pronunciation yielded by the French transcription rules. In speech recognition based interactive vocal services, adding pronunciation variants to the basic phonetic transcription reduces the substitution error rate on proper names and makes applications using proper names more user friendly.