Phonetic Distance Based Accent Classifier to Identify Pronunciation Variants and OOV Words

Abstract

The state-of-the-art Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems lack the ability to identify spoken words if they have non-standard pronunciations. In this paper, we present a new classification algorithm to identify pronunciation variants. It uses Dynamic Phone Warping (DPW) technique to compute the pronunciation-by-pronunciation phonetic distance and a threshold critical distance criterion for the classification. The proposed method consists of two steps; a training step to estimate a critical distance parameter using transcribed data and in the second step, use this critical distance criterion to classify the input utterances into the pronunciation variants and OOV words.The algorithm is implemented using Java language. The classifier is trained on data sets from TIMIT speech corpus and CMU pronunciation dictionary. The confusion matrix and precision, recall and accuracy performance metrics are used for the performance evaluation. Experimental results show significant performance improvement over the existing classifiers.