Basic directions in automatic speech recognition

Abstract

This paper represents a view of basic problems in automatic speech recognition drawn from the vantage point of applied linguistics. The basic areas of speech production, articulatory phonetics, acoustic analysis, acoustic phonetics, and phonetic sequences of natural speech are crucial to flexible automatic speech recognition, especially for the long-range goal of recognizing continuous-flow large-vocabulary natural speech of different speakers. Articulatory phonetics provides a link between the physical events of speech and the elements of the phonological code. The processes of speech production are basic to articulatory phonetics while the acoustic theory of speech production provides a basis for the phonetic interpretation of the acoustic. speech waveform. Formant frequencies are particularly important acoustic parameters and recent improvements in formant tracking are encouraging for speech recognition. Even if complete phonetic recognition is realized, however, there remains the conversion of phonetic strings to lexical strings. This problem requires extensive phonetic analysis of actual spoken language.