The selection of pronunciation variants: comparing the performance of man and machine

Abstract

In this paper the performance of an automatic transcription tool is evaluated. The transcription tool is a Continuous Speech Recognizer (CSR) running in forced recognition mode. For evaluation the performance of the CSR was compared to that of nine expert listeners. Both man and the machine carried out exactly the same task: deciding whether a segment was present or not in 467 cases. It turned out that the performance of the CSR is comparable to that of the experts.