Acoustic-phonetic experiment facility for the study of continuous speech

While gathering acoustic data for the acoustic-phonetic analysis of speech, it is necessary to consider many different sounds in varying phonetic environments to assure that the results are statistically significant. In order to reduce the amount of time required to test hypotheses, a facility has been developed which provides an interactive environment for performing a wide variety of acoustic-phonetic experiments on a large data base of continuous speech. Using this facility, one can formulate an experiment, run it on selected portions (or all) of the data base, and display or tabulate the results in a meaningful way. Another experiment may then be run based on the results. CPU time required to run an experiment on the entire data base is between 5 and 20 seconds, depending on the complexity of the experiment. Due to the ease of interactions, formulating or revising an experiment, running it, and displaying the results normally takes less than 5 minutes. This facility has been used in combination with a data base of 69 hand-labeled sentences to develop algorithms for acoustic-phonetic segmentation and labeling in a speech understanding system. Several examples of its use and the results obtained will be presented.