How to Improve Human and Machine Transcriptions of Spontaneous Speech

Abstract

This paper reports on an experiment aimed at measuring the quality of automatic and human phonetic transcriptions of different speech styles that were produced within the framework of a large speech corpus project for Dutch, the Spoken Dutch Corpus (Corpus Gesproken Nederlands, CGN). The results indicate that the procedure adopted in the CGN to improve the quality of phonetic transcriptions does indeed contribute to achieving this aim. However, better transcriptions of spontaneous speech could probably be obtained by resorting to ASR techniques for pronunciation variation modeling. Our research indicates how this could be achieved.