ISCA Archive ICSLP 2002
ISCA Archive ICSLP 2002

Integrating speech with keypad input for automatic entry of spelling and pronunciation of new words

Grace Chung, Stephanie Seneff

This paper describes research whose ultimate aim is to support automatic entry of new words into a spoken dialogue system through interaction with a user. This research demonstrates an important step towards this goal, through a procedure which integrates information made available via the telephone keypad with a spoken instance of the target word, to produce a candidate spelling and pronunciation for the word. Through the use of a parsing mechanism applied to a 73,000 word proper name lexicon [4], we have been able to create a finite-state transducer (FST) that maps phonetics to graphemics, which can be composed with an FST derived from the keypad input to greatly reduce the search space. Experiments conducted on both the OGI name corpus [2] and a set of enrollment data obtained from our Mercury system [5] validate the procedure.