Francois Roewer-Despres


2021

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Towards Detection and Remediation of Phonemic Confusion
Francois Roewer-Despres | Arnold Yeung | Ilan Kogan
Proceedings of the 18th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

Reducing communication breakdown is critical to success in interactive NLP applications, such as dialogue systems. To this end, we propose a confusion-mitigation framework for the detection and remediation of communication breakdown. In this work, as a first step towards implementing this framework, we focus on detecting phonemic sources of confusion. As a proof-of-concept, we evaluate two neural architectures in predicting the probability that a listener will misunderstand phonemes in an utterance. We show that both neural models outperform a weighted n-gram baseline, showing early promise for the broader framework.