Refutation based recognition to help vowel articulation

Between speech training and speech recognition, we provide speech teachers with an innovative tool for teaching deaf children how to master the articulation of voiced sounds. Two theoretical aspects of this work are important : Phonemes are seen as elements of an organized structure The phonetic recognition is based on rejection principles The following developments derive from those two main ideas: In a set of N phonemes, a phoneme is defined by N - 1 relations which the N - 1 possible pairs determine. In the recognition phase, when confronting two phonemes, the refutation discards the least probable one. Eventually, if a phoneme is never rejected, its label is selected. The method valuation takes the types of errors into account when measuring the recognition rate. Last, we describe a speaker independent program (with a high recognition rate) producing an attractive real time feed-back for vowel articulation.