Dealing with numbers in grapheme-based speech recognition

Abstract

This article presents the results of grapheme-based speech recognition for eight languages. The need for this approach arises in situation of low resource languages, where obtaining a pronunciation dictionary is time- and cost-consuming or impossible. In such scenarios, usage of grapheme dictionaries is the most simplest and straight-forward. The paper describes the process of automatic generation of pronunciation dictionaries with emphasis on the expansion of numbers. Experiments on GlobalPhone database show that grapheme-based systems have results comparable to the phoneme-based ones, especially for phonetic languages. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.