French large vocabulary recognition with cross-word phonology transducers

word word P(w) (decision tree) model Although finite-state transducers have been widely used in linguistics, their application to speech recognition has begun only recently [I]. We describe our implementation of French large vocabulary recognition based on transducers, and how we take advantage of this approach to integrate automatic pronunciation rules and cross-word phenomena such as French 'liaison'. We also show that a simple, single-level Viterbi algorithm can efficiently decode speech recognition transducers and handle cross-word context models and cross-word phonological rules.