Non-native Accent Pronunciation Modeling in Automatic Speech Recognition

Abstract

In this paper, we proposed an approach to model the pronunciation of non-native accented speech for automatic speech recognition system. The proposed method consists of two phases: phones adaptation and pronunciation generalization. In phones adaptation, we identify the phones used by non-native speakers compared to the standard phones, and then remove the mismatch, as a result of the influence from mother tongue. In pronunciation adaptation, we predict the pronunciations of words by non-native speakers. The results shown the proposed approach reduce the WER from 44.8% to 41.9%.