In:
The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Acoustical Society of America (ASA), Vol. 103, No. 5_Supplement ( 1998-05-01), p. 2980-2980
Abstract:
Proper names have several properties that create problems for speech recognition systems: the number of names is large and ever changing, names can be borrowed directly from other languages and may not conform to usual pronunciation rules, and the variety of pronunciations for names can be high. Because the set of proper names is so dynamic and machines are notoriously poor at phoneme recognition, a promising approach to designing a name recognition system is to incorporate statistical aspects of proper names (e.g., frequency, familiarity). Unfortunately, there exists relatively little data on the distribution of names. Ratings of familiarity and pronounceability were obtained for a randomly chosen sample of 199 surnames (from 80 987 entries in the Purdue phonebook) and 199 nouns (from Kucera–Francis). The ratings for nouns versus names are substantially different: nouns were rated as more familiar and easier to pronounce than surnames. Frequency and familiarity were more closely related in the proper name pool than the word pool, although the correlations were modest. Ratings of familiarity and pronounceability were highly related for both groups. The value of using frequency and the ratings of familiarity and pronounceability for predicting variations in actual pronunciations of words and names will be discussed.
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
0001-4966
,
1520-8524
Language:
English
Publisher:
Acoustical Society of America (ASA)
Publication Date:
1998
detail.hit.zdb_id:
1461063-2
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