Using phonetic knowledge in tools and resources for Natural Language Processing and Pronunciation Evaluation

• Ano de defesa: 2016
• Autor(a) principal: Almeida, Gustavo Augusto de Mendonça
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Biblioteca Digitais de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Palavras-chave em Português: Automatic pronunciation assessment; Avaliação de pronúncia automática; Balanceamento de corpus; Conversão grafema-fonema; Corpus balancing; Corretor ortográfico; Natural language processing; Processamento de língua natural; Pronunciation training; Spelling correction; Text-to-speech; Treino de pronúncia
• Link de acesso: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/55/55134/tde-17112016-161826/

This thesis presents tools and resources for the development of applications in Natural Language Processing and Pronunciation Training. There are four main contributions. First, a hybrid grapheme-to-phoneme converter for Brazilian Portuguese, named Aeiouadô, which makes use of both manual transcription rules and Classification and Regression Trees (CART) to infer the phone transcription. Second, a spelling correction system based on machine learning, which uses the trascriptions produced by Aeiouadô and is capable of handling phonologically-motivated errors, as well as contextual errors. Third, a method for the extraction of phonetically-rich sentences, which is based on greedy algorithms. Fourth, a prototype system for automatic pronunciation assessment, especially designed for Brazilian-accented English.