Applying speech verification to a large data base of German to obtain a statistical survey about rules of pronunciation
Maria-Barbara Wesenick, Florian Schiel · 1994
In this paper we present a new research project to obtain a statistical survey of the pronunciation of German using an automatic system for segmentation and labeling of speech data and a very large data base of spoken German (GermAn Spoken in Public, GASP). It mainly involves the development of two components: a) An automatic system of speech verification (PHONSEG) which produces a segmentation with semi-continuous HMMs corresponding to a given input-string of phonetic segment labels. b) A rule corpus of German pronunciation (PHONHYP) with which various possible forms of pronunciation can be derived from a citation form in order to model the variability of speech on a relatively broad segmental level. The rules express processes in German that are well-known and that can be observed in manual transcriptions as for example contained in the German PhonDat database. The input to the system as a whole is the speech wave and the orthographic representation or the citation forms of the words...