A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Hybrid Phone-Manner Representations for ASR

In the past decade, several researchers have started reinvestigating the use of sub-phonetic models for lexical representations within automatic speech recognition systems. Lest history repeat itself, it may be instructive to mine the further past for models of lexical representations in the lexical access literature. In this work, we re-evaluate the model of Briscoe (1989), in which a hybrid strategy of lexical representation between phones and manner classes is promoted. While many of Briscoe’s assumptions do not match up with current ASR processing models, we show that his conclusions are essentially correct, and that reconsidering this structure for ASR lexica is an appropriate avenue for future ASR research.