A more general method for pronunciation learning

Automatic speech recognition relies on pronunciation dictionaries for accurate results and previous work used pronunciation learning algorithms to build them. Efficient algorithms must balance having the ability to learn varied pronunciations while being constrained enough to be robust. Our approach extends one of such algorithms \cite{Kou2015} by replacing a finite state transducer (FST) built from a limited-size candidate list with a general and flexible FST building mechanism. This architecture can accommodate a wide variety of pronunciation predictions and can also learn pronunciations without having the written form. It can also use an FST built from a recursive neural network (RNN) and tune the importance given to the written form. The new approach reduces the number of incorrect pronunciations learned by up to 25% (relative) on a random sampling of Google voice traffic

• Speech Processing