An expert system for the automatic reading of French spectrograms

We report on a long term project on the phonetic decoding of continuous speech, within the framework of an expert system. Spectrogram reading is the field of expertise under study, although it is clear that an automatic phonetic decoder should not be in the form of an expert system. We expect major improvements in the recognition rate when expert\´s rules will be incorporated into existing systems. We describe here both the method used to retrieve the human expertise and results by an experienced spectrogram reader on 50 phonetically-balanced sentences. We also sketch various ways in which the expert rules can be validated through an "inference engine" and actually used in a system. Finally, we discuss the impact this approach has on the design.