Computer-aided quality assurance of an Icelandic pronunciation dictionary
Abstract
We propose a model-driven method for ensuring the quality of pronunciation
dictionaries. The key ingredient is computing an alignment between letter strings
and phoneme strings, a standard technique in pronunciation modeling. The novel
aspect of our method is the use of informative, parametric alignment models which
are refined iteratively as they are tested against the data. We discuss the use of
alignment failures as a signal for detecting and correcting problematic dictionary
entries. We illustrate this method using an existing pronunciation dictionary for
Icelandic. Our method is completely general and has been applied in the
construction of pronunciation dictionaries for commercially deployed speech
recognition systems in several languages.
