Interactive extraction of phonemic variation rules in continuous speech

An approach to continuous speech recognition is introduced, and an extraction method for phonemic variation rules and the extracted rules are reported. To realize a continuous speech recognizer, we must solve the problem of phonemic variations in continuous speech. We use a top-down method. Our current effort is focused on interactive analysis of phonemic variations in continuous speech and extraction of the phonemic variation rules, to construct a data base of these rules. We analyzed phonemic variations in 1000 Japanese-language phrases spoken by a male speaker, and confirmed that all the phonemic variations in the 1000 phrases can be represented by about 160 rules. In addition, we obtained the occurrence probability of each phonemic variation from the frequency of use of each rule.