Acoustic-phonetic recognition in BBN SPEECHLIS

This paper describes the acoustic-phonetic analysis of continuous speech in a complete speech understanding system. The system accepts various parameters derived from the digital waveform and short-time spectra, and produces a segment lattice where segments can have overlapping boundaries and the description of segments is a list of labels. Acoustic-Phonetic as well as phonological knowledge of English is employed extensively in labeling the segments. Each label also has associated with it a score, reflecting the confidence in its identity. A description of the acoustic-phonetic analyzer, as well as statistics related to its performance will be presented in detail.