An expert spectrogram reader: A knowledge-based approach to speech recognition

Human experts can determine the phonetic identity of unknown utterances from a visual examination of the spectrogram with performance better than available computer systems. The spectrogram-reading process involves the use of multiple sources of knowledge, including articulatory movements, acoustic phonetics, phonotactics, and linguistics. In addition, the experts´ performance can be attributed to their ability to deal with partial and/or conflicting information, as well as multiple cues. This paper investigates the feasibility of constructing a knowledge-based system that mimics the process of spectrogram reading by humans. In a task of identifying stop consonants extracted from continuous speech, the system achieved performance that is comparable to that of the experts.