Non-native spontaneous speech recognition through polyphone decision tree specialization

Abstract

With more and more non-native speakers speaking in English, the fast and efficient adaptation to non-native English speech becomes a practical concern. The performance of speech recognition systems is consistently poor on non-native speech. The challenge for non-native speech recognition is to maximize the recognition performance with small amount of non-native data available. In this paper we report on the effectiveness of using polyphone decision tree specialization method for non-native speech adaptation and recognition. Several recognition results are presented by using non-native speech from German speakers. Results obtained from the experiments demonstrate the feasibility of this method.