Abstract
Variations in rate of speech (ROS) produce changes in both spectral features and word pronunciations that affect ASR systems. To cope with these effects, we propose to use rate-specific phone models and pronunciations for ROS modeling at the word level. Words are given three types of pronunciations — fast, slow, and medium — consisting of rate-specific phone models, respectively. This approach allows us to model within-sentence rate variation. To better model coarticulation effects, we introduce the concept of zero-length phones, which enables short phones to be skipped without having to change their neighboring phones’ contexts. A data-driven approach is used to prune the pronunciation dictionary derived from rules for phone reduction. […]
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