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Number of phonemes required in Pocketsphinx

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Li3
2011-06-23
2012-09-22
  • Li3

    Li3 - 2011-06-23

    Hello,

    I have a question regarding support of various languages on Pocketsphinx.

    For English, Pocketsphinx seems to be using 39 phonemes. I want to get a
    feel of number of phonemes that would be required in Pocketsphinx to support
    each of these other popular languages of the world:
    Spanish
    Italian
    French
    German
    Russian
    Arabic
    Chinese
    Japanese
    Hindi

    Thanks,
    Li

     
  • Pranav Jawale

    Pranav Jawale - 2011-06-23

    Phonemes depend on the language and not on the recognizer. If your language

    has 100 phonemes, you will have to use 100. The more phonemes you want to
    train, the more training data will be required. If two phonemes sound similar,
    you may decide to combine them (call them by the same name), and the number
    comes down.

    Read http://cmusphinx.sourceforge.net/wiki/tutorialconcepts

     
  • Li3

    Li3 - 2011-06-23

    Thanks pranavj.

    ok let me slightly rephrase the question. Pocketsphinx has a model by the name
    of hub4wsj_sc_8k which gives reasonably good accuracy (english). If one were
    to create similar-accuracy acoustic models for each of the above specified
    languages, what would be the reasonable numbers of phonemes required for each
    of the languages. I'm not looking for an exact numbers but reasonably rough
    estimates. Any ideas ?

    thanks, Li

     
  • Pranav Jawale

    Pranav Jawale - 2011-06-23

    I don't know if anybody has done such a study, but for Hindi around 50
    phonemes are there

    see [http://books.google.co.in/books?id=XYgdrA1CIhgC&pg=PA261&lpg=PA261&dq=hin
    di+phone+set&source=bl&ots=gM1Crifd8-&sig=wX4NXivuF9NwBXP2A5SAFWUDrX8&hl=en&ei
    =wyIDTrGfNo60rAe5p-yRDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CEoQ6AEwBA

    v=onepage&q=hindi%20phone%20set&f=false](http://books.google.co.in/books?id=X

    YgdrA1CIhgC&pg=PA261&lpg=PA261&dq=hindi%2Bphone%2Bset&source=bl&ots=gM1Crifd8-
    &sig=wX4NXivuF9NwBXP2A5SAFWUDrX8&hl=en&ei=wyIDTrGfNo60rAe5p-yRDg&sa=X&oi=book_
    result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CEoQ6AEwBA%23v=onepage&q=hindi%20phone%20set&f=
    false)

    Actually, why do you want phones in all these languages? Are you interested in
    all of them?

     
  • Li3

    Li3 - 2011-06-23

    Thanks for the link pranavj. I needed phoneme information for above languages
    for exploring a HW accelerator possibility. This info will help in keeping it
    generic enough. Thanks, Li

     
  • hindiasradmin

    hindiasradmin - 2011-08-08

    Choosing a proper phoneme set for any speech application (ASR / TTS) is a
    tricky thing. Generally from linguistic point of view phoneme is a smallest
    contrastive sound unit in context of a particular language. Linguistically
    defined phoneme set is derived by perceptual and articulatory studies. But
    from speech applications' point of view the phoneme set need not be same as
    defined in any linguistics / phonetics book. What is more important is which
    phone occurs with what frequency, and is there any value in modeling each
    phoneme distinctly.
    Another important point is one need not necessarily go for phonemes as units
    for acoustic model. It could be words / syllables (or even something else) as
    well. The judgment of which unit should be used depends solely on application,
    amount of training data, vocabulary size etc.

     

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