15th International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS-15)

Barcelona, Spain
August 3-9, 2003


Acoustic-Phonetic Knowledge and Statistics in Automatic Speech Recognition

Hermann Ney

RWTH Aachen, Germany

This paper deals with the relation of acoustic-phonetic knowledge and its role in automatic speech recognition. Two applications of acoustic-phonetic knowledge are considered in more detail: 1) coarticulation, i.e. the context dependency of the acoustic realizations of phonemes, and 2) speaker adaptation by vocal tract length normalization.
   About 25 years ago for each of these two applications, there were already proposals for modelling these types of acoustic-phonetic dependencies. However, in order to successfully exploit these dependencies for automatic speech recognition, the lesson we learned is that a very careful integration of these dependencies into the statistical approach is required.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Ney, Hermann (2003): "Acoustic-phonetic knowledge and statistics in automatic speech recognition", In ICPhS-15, 59-62.