sphinx-4 NullPointerException at startRecognition

Question

I'm trying to follow this tutorial, and it crashes upon startup after having lots of problems with the dictionary and models, such as.

The dictionary is missing a phonetic transcription for the word 'humphrey'

and

Dec 18, 2014 1:14:50 PM edu.cmu.sphinx.linguist.lextree.HMMTree addPronunciation SEVERE: Missing HMM for unit T with lc=N rc=EH1 13:14:50.601 SEVERE lexTreeLinguist Bad HMM Unit: EH1

I loaded this dictionary and got the language and acoustic models from their SourceForge page

It then crashes with this:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.NullPointerException
    at edu.cmu.sphinx.linguist.lextree.HMMNode.getBaseUnit(HMMTree.java:506)
    at edu.cmu.sphinx.linguist.lextree.HMMNode.<init>(HMMTree.java:484)
    at edu.cmu.sphinx.linguist.lextree.Node.addSuccessor(HMMTree.java:165)
    at edu.cmu.sphinx.linguist.lextree.HMMTree$EntryPoint.createEntryPointMap(HMMTree.java:1163)
    at edu.cmu.sphinx.linguist.lextree.HMMTree$EntryPointTable.createEntryPointMaps(HMMTree.java:1021)
    at edu.cmu.sphinx.linguist.lextree.HMMTree.compile(HMMTree.java:795)
    at edu.cmu.sphinx.linguist.lextree.HMMTree.<init>(HMMTree.java:716)
    at edu.cmu.sphinx.linguist.lextree.LexTreeLinguist.generateHmmTree(LexTreeLinguist.java:433)
    at edu.cmu.sphinx.linguist.lextree.LexTreeLinguist.compileGrammar(LexTreeLinguist.java:420)
    at edu.cmu.sphinx.linguist.lextree.LexTreeLinguist.allocate(LexTreeLinguist.java:337)
    at edu.cmu.sphinx.decoder.search.WordPruningBreadthFirstSearchManager.allocate(WordPruningBreadthFirstSearchManager.java:232)
    at edu.cmu.sphinx.decoder.AbstractDecoder.allocate(AbstractDecoder.java:92)
    at edu.cmu.sphinx.recognizer.Recognizer.allocate(Recognizer.java:167)
    at edu.cmu.sphinx.api.LiveSpeechRecognizer.startRecognition(LiveSpeechRecognizer.java:46)
    at com.test.sphinxtest.App.main(App.java:25)

Here's my code.

package com.test.sphinxtest;

import java.io.IOException;

import edu.cmu.sphinx.api.Configuration;
import edu.cmu.sphinx.api.LiveSpeechRecognizer;
import edu.cmu.sphinx.api.SpeechResult;

/**
 * Hello world!
 *
 */
public class App 
{
    public static void main( String[] args )
    {
        Configuration configuration = new Configuration();

        configuration.setAcousticModelPath("models/acousticmodel/en-us");
        configuration.setDictionaryPath("dictionary/cmudict-0.6d");
        configuration.setLanguageModelPath("models/languagemodel/en-us.lm");

        try {
            LiveSpeechRecognizer recognizer = new LiveSpeechRecognizer(configuration);
            recognizer.startRecognition(true);
            SpeechResult result = recognizer.getResult();
            recognizer.stopRecognition();
            while ((result = recognizer.getResult()) != null) {
                System.out.println(result.getHypothesis());
            }
        } catch (IOException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

The correct dictionary should not have stress marks, you can download it from here:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cmusphinx/pocketsphinx/master/model/en-us/cmudict-en-us.dict