Towards Detection and Remediation of Phonemic Confusion

Reducing communication breakdown is critical to success in interactive NLP applications, such as dialogue systems. To this end, we propose a confusion-mitigation framework for the detection and remediation of communication breakdown. In this work, as a first step towards implementing this framework, we focus on detecting phonemic sources of confusion. As a proof-of-concept, we evaluate two neural architectures in predicting the probability that a listener will misunderstand phonemes in an utterance. We show that both neural models outperform a weighted n-gram baseline, showing early promise for the broader framework.