Correction of phoneme recognition errors in word learning through speech interaction

Abstract

This paper describes a novel method that enables users to teach systems the phoneme sequences of new words through speech interaction. Using the method, users can correct mis-recognized phoneme sequences incrementally by making corrective utterances. Each corrective utterance may include the whole or a segment of the word. During the interaction, if the correction using the utterance results in a better phoneme sequence than the previous one, a user can stop the interaction or make a corrective utterance again. Otherwise the user can reject the utterance. The originalities of this method are 1) interactive correction by speech, 2) the use of spoken word segments for locating mis-recognized phonemes and, 3) the use of generalized posterior probability (GPP) as a measure of correcting mis-recognized phonemes. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieved 96.8% in phoneme accuracy and 79.1% in word accuracy, with less than seven corrective utterances.