Measurement of Phonemic Distances and its Applications

Abstract

Measurement of sound distance between a pair of spoken words is a critical requirement in pronunciation recognition systems. In this paper, we present a new methodology to measure the distance between the words and pronunciations. The phonemic distance is used as the distortion measure. Inter-pronunciation phonemic distances are measured using dynamic phone warping algorithm. The data sets are taken from TIMIT, NTIMIT databases. The results have shown a significant improvement in identifying various pronunciation variations