Patent attributes
The error rate of a pronunciation guesser that guesses the phonetic spelling of words used in speech recognition is improved by causing its training to weigh letter-to-phoneme mappings used as data in such training as a function of the frequency of the words in which such mappings occur. Preferably the ratio of the weight to word frequency increases as word frequencies decreases. Acoustic phoneme models for use in speech recognition with phonetic spellings generated by a pronunciation guesser that makes errors are trained against word models whose phonetic spellings have been generated by a pronunciation guesser that makes similar errors. As a result, the acoustic models represent blends of phoneme sounds that reflect the spelling errors made by the pronunciation guessers. Speech recognition enabled systems are made by storing in them both a pronunciation guesser and a corresponding set of such blended acoustic models.
