Akella Amarendra Babu¹ and Ramadevi Yellasiri², ¹St. Martin's Engineering College, India and ²CBIT, India

Human beings generate different speech waveforms while speaking the same word at different times. Also, different human beings have different accents and generate significantly varying speech waveforms for the same word. There is a need to measure the distances between various words which facilitate preparation of pronunciation dictionaries. A new algorithm called Dynamic Phone Warping (DPW) is presented in this paper. It uses dynamic programming technique for global alignment and shortest distance measurements. The DPW algorithm can be used to enhance the pronunciation dictionaries of the well-known languages like English or to build pronunciation dictionaries to the less known sparse languages. The precision measurement experiments show 88.9% accuracy

Natural Language processing, word distance measurements, pronunciation dictionaries.