ISCA Archive Interspeech 2004
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2004

The efficient generation of pronunciation dictionaries: machine learning factors during bootstrapping

Marelie Davel, Etienne Barnard

Several factors affect the efficiency of bootstrapping approaches to the generation of pronunciation dictionaries. We focus on factors related to the underlying rule-extraction algorithms, and demonstrate variants of the Dynamically Expanding Context algorithm which are beneficial for this application. In particular, we show that continuous updating of the learned rules, coupled with a new approach to phoneme alignment and a sliding-window approach to choosing the context window, leads to an efficient and accurate bootstrapping mechanism.