Pronunciation Modeling for Malaysian English

In this paper, we proposed an approach to model the pronunciation of Malaysian English for automatic speech recognition. The proposed method consists of two phases: phones adaptation and pronunciation generalization. In the first phase of phones adaptation, we identify the English phonemes used by Malaysian speakers by carrying out perception test, and then the mismatch due to the influenced of the speaker´s mother tongue is removed. The second phase of the proposed approach is pronunciation generalization. In this phase, the hypothesis is that non-native speakers generalized the pronunciation of syllable in different contexts and words by applying the same pronunciations. The proposed approach has improved the performance of the automatic speech recognition. The results shown that the proposed approach reduces the word error rate (WER) from 34.6% to 33.9%.