Method and system of generating and detecting confusing phones of pronunciation

Abstract

A method of generating and detecting confusing phones/syllables is disclosed. The method includes a generating stage and a detecting stage. The generating stage includes: (a) input a Mandarin utterance; (b) partition the Mandarin utterance into segmented phones/syllables and generate the most likely route in a recognition net via Forced Alignment of Viterbi decoding; (c) compare the segmented phones/syllables with a Mandarin acoustic model; (d) determine whether a confusing phone/syllable exists; (e) add the confusing phone/syllable into the recognition net and repeat step (b), (c), and (d) when the confusing phone/syllable exists; (f) stop and output all generated confusing phones/syllables to a confusing phone/syllable file when a confusing phone/syllable does not exist. The detecting stage includes: (g) input a spoken sentence; (h) align the spoken sentence with the recognition net; (i) determine the most likely route of the spoken sentence; and (j) compare the most likely route of the spoken sentence with the target route of the spoken sentence to detect pronunciation error and give high-level pronunciation suggestions.