Robust word boundary detection in spontaneous speech using acoustic and lexical cues | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore

Robust word boundary detection in spontaneous speech using acoustic and lexical cues


Abstract:

We consider the problem of word boundary detection in spontaneous speech utterances. Acoustic features have been well explored in the literature in the context of word bo...Show More

Abstract:

We consider the problem of word boundary detection in spontaneous speech utterances. Acoustic features have been well explored in the literature in the context of word boundary detection; however, in spontaneous speech of Switchboard-I corpus, we found that the accuracy of word boundary detection using acoustic features is poor (F-score ~ 0.63). We propose a new feature - that captures lexical cues in the context of the word boundary detection problem. We show that including proposed lexical feature along with the usual acoustic features, the accuracy of the word boundary detection improves considerably (F-score ~ 0.81). We also demonstrate the robustness of our proposed feature in presence of different noise levels for additive white and pink noise.
Date of Conference: 19-24 April 2009
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 26 May 2009
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Conference Location: Taipei, Taiwan

1. INTRODUCTION

Automatic word boundary detection, a topic that has been investigated for several decades, is still an active area of research due to its impact in diverse applications and, the challenging nature of the problem. Initial applications have included detection of the exact word boundaries to assess speech recognition performance and to make recognizers faster. Other, applications of word boundary detection include detecting regions of out of vocabulary (OOV) words and detecting exact boundaries for unknown named entities in speech. Word boundary information can also be helpful for rich transcription of speech such as in detecting emphatic (prominent) words [1].

References

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