It has been well-documented for several languages that human interlocutors tend to adapt their linguistic productions to become more similar to each other. This behavior, known as entrainment, affects lexical choice as well, both with regard to specific words, such as referring expressions, and overall style. We offer what we believe to be the first investigation of such lexical entrainment in Hebrew. Using two existing measures, we analyze Hebrew speakers interacting in a Map Task, a popular experimental setup, and find rich evidence of lexical entrainment. Analyzing speaker pairs by the combination of their genders as well as speakers by their individual gender, we find no clear pattern of differences. We do, however, find that speakers in a position of less power entrain more than those with greater power, which matches theoretical accounts. Overall, our results mostly accord with those for American English, with a lack of entrainment on hedge words being the main difference.

Building a comprehensive pronunciation lexicon is a crucial element in the success of any speech recognition engine. The first stage of lexicon design involves the compilation of a comprehensive word list that keeps the Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) word rate to a minimum. The second stage involves providing optimized phonemic representations for all lexical items on the list. The research presented here focuses on the first stage of lexicon design ― word list compilation, and describes the methodologies employed in the collection of a pronunciation lexicon designed for the purpose of American English voice message transcription using speech recognition. The lexicon design used is based on a topic domain structure with a target of 90% word coverage for each domain. This differs somewhat from standard approaches where probable words from textual corpora are extracted. This paper raises four issues involved in lexicon design for the transcription of spontaneous voice messages: the inclusion of interjections and other characteristics common to spontaneous speech; the identification of unique messaging terminology; the relative ratio of proper nouns to common words; and the overall size of the lexicon.