An advanced system to generate pronunciations of proper nouns

Abstract

Accurate recognition of proper nouns is a critical component of automatic speech recognition (ASR). Since there are no obvious letter-to-sound conversion rules that govern the pronunciation of any large set of proper nouns, this is an open-ended problem that evolves constantly under various sociolinguistic influences. A Boltzmann machine neural network is well-suited for the task of generating the most likely pronunciations of a proper noun. This pronunciation output can be used to build better acoustic models for the noun that result in improved recognition performance. We present an advanced version of this N-best pronunciations system; and a multiple pronunciations dictionary of 18000 surnames and 25000 pronunciations used as a training database. The database and software are available in the public domain.