Comparison between expert listeners and continuous speech recognizers in selecting pronunciation variants.

Abstract

In this paper, the performance of an automatic transcription tool is evaluated. The transcription tool is a continuous speech recognizer (CSR) which can be used to select pronunciation variants (i.e. detect insertions and deletions of phones). The performance of the CSR was compared to a reference transcription based on the judgments of expert listeners. We investigated to what extent the degree of agreement between the listeners and the CSR was affected by employing various sets of phone models (PMs). Overall, the PMs perform more similarly to the listeners when pronunciation variation is modeled. However, the various sets of PMs lead to different results for insertion and deletion processes. Furthermore, we found that to a certain degree, word error rates can be used to predict which set of PMs to use in the transcription tool.