# DTW-SiameseNet: Dynamic Time Warped Siamese Network for Mispronunciation Detection and Correction

## TL;DR

This paper introduces DTW-SiameseNet, a novel metric learning model using Siamese architecture and DTW for accurate, locale-agnostic detection and correction of TTS mispronunciations, enhancing pronunciation accuracy in multilingual settings.

## Contribution

The work presents a new DTW-SiameseNet model for mispronunciation detection that is privacy-preserving and effective across different locales, improving over existing phoneme-based methods.

## Key findings

- Improves pronunciation accuracy by ~6% over baselines.
- Demonstrates feasibility of locale-agnostic, privacy-preserving mispronunciation detection.
- Validates approach on real-world, multilingual dataset.

## Abstract

Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) - such as Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant, to name a few - play an increasingly important role to access information and complete tasks spanning multiple domains, and by diverse groups of users. A text-to-speech (TTS) module allows PDAs to interact in a natural, human-like manner, and play a vital role when the interaction involves people with visual impairments or other disabilities. To cater to the needs of a diverse set of users, inclusive TTS is important to recognize and pronounce correctly text in different languages and dialects. Despite great progress in speech synthesis, the pronunciation accuracy of named entities in a multi-lingual setting still has a large room for improvement. Existing approaches to correct named entity (NE) mispronunciations, like retraining Grapheme-to-Phoneme (G2P) models, or maintaining a TTS pronunciation dictionary, require expensive annotation of the ground truth pronunciation, which is also time consuming. In this work, we present a highly-precise, PDA-compatible pronunciation learning framework for the task of TTS mispronunciation detection and correction. In addition, we also propose a novel mispronunciation detection model called DTW-SiameseNet, which employs metric learning with a Siamese architecture for Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) with triplet loss. We demonstrate that a locale-agnostic, privacy-preserving solution to the problem of TTS mispronunciation detection is feasible. We evaluate our approach on a real-world dataset, and a corpus of NE pronunciations of an anonymized audio dataset of person names recorded by participants from 10 different locales. Human evaluation shows our proposed approach improves pronunciation accuracy on average by ~6% compared to strong phoneme-based and audio-based baselines.