Acoustic-phonetic experiment facility for the study of continuous speech

Abstract

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, display or tabulate the results in a meaningful way, and then run another experiment (or a variant thereof) based on the results. Due to the ease of interactions, formulating or revising an experiment, running it, and displaying the results normally takes less than 5 min. 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.