Many of these kinds of elements are pronounced according to principles that are quite different from the pronunciation of ordinary words. For instance, an essential feature of natural human-computer interfaces is that the computer be capable of responding with spoken replies or comments. In Automatic Speech Recognition nonstandard types cause problems for training acoustic as well as language models. More sophisticated text normalization will be an important tool for utilizing the vast amounts of on-line text resources.
Normalized text is likely to be of specific benefit in information extraction applications.
This project will apply language modeling techniques to creation of wide coverage models for disambiguating non-standard words in English.