Phonetic and lexical processing in the HWIM speech understanding system

Abstract

The “front end” of HWIM, the BBN speech understanding system, is that part of the system that governs the formation and evaluation of hypotheses between the levels of the speech signal and the word. It comprises processes for signal processing, acoustic-phonetic recognition, lexical-segmental matching, and lexical-parametric matching. Implicit in the lexical matching processes is the application of phonological rules, both within word pronunciations and across word boundaries. A consistent scoring policy governs the evaluation of hypothesis at the segmental and word levels, and this policy is carried into the control component of the system, where it is applied to multiword hypotheses about the interpretation of the utterance. [This research was supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense and was monitored by ONR under Contract No. N00014-75-C-0053.]