METHOD AND SYSTEM FOR AUTOMATICALLY DETERMINING PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTIONS ASSOCIATED WITH SPELLED WORDS

New entries are added to the lexicon by entering them as spelled words. A transcription generator, such as a decision-tree-based phoneme or morpheme transcription generator, converts each spelled word into a set of n-best transcriptions or sequences. Meanwhile, user input or automatically generated speech corresponding to the spelled word is processed by an automatic speech recognizer and the recognizer rescores the transcriptions or sequences produced by the transcription generator. One or more of the highest scored (highest confidence) transcriptions may be added to the lexicon to update it. If desired, the spelled word-pronunciation pairs generated by the system can be used to retrain the transcription generator, making the system adaptive or self-learning.