A phonetically based approach to speech recognition uses speech specific knowledge obtained from phonotactics, phonology and acoustic phonetics to capture relevant phonetic information. Thus, a recognition system based on this approach can make broad classiflcations as well as detailed phonetic distinctions. This paper discusses a framework for developing a phonettcally based recognition system...

A Conditional Random Field is a mathematical model for sequences that is similar in many ways to a Hidden Markov Model, but is discriminative rather than generative in nature. Here we explore the application of the CRF model to ASR processing by building a system that performs first-pass phonetic recogintion using discriminatively trained phonetic attributes. This system achieves an accuracy le...

We describe a method for the automatic production of phonetic transcriptions in large speech corpora. First, we focus on the application of different techniques for the generation of pronunciation variants. Then, we explain the application of a speech recognition system for selecting the acoustically best matching phonetic transcription. The system is evaluated on different test sets selected f...

This paper describes the latest progress in the development of a text-to-speech system for Portuguese. The system comprises 4 major modules: text normalization, linguistic and phonetic processing, generation of the synthesizer parameters and synthesis. The present rule-based version, based on the Klatt80 formant synthesizer, has achieved promising results, namely in what concerns the performanc...

This paper discusses a particular problem attendant upon the hypothesis that phonological patterns emerge directly from considerations of phonetic functionality: the problem is that phonological patterns frequently display stability across tokens and contexts, where direct phonetic conditioning would predict variation. I suggest that this stabilization might emerge from an exemplar-based speech...

In this paper, we describe the first Mandarin/Taiwanese (Min-nan) bi-lingual, continuous speech recognition system for large vocabulary or vocabulary-independent applications. A phonetic transcription system called Tong-yong Phonetic Alphabet (TYPA) is described and used to transcribe the bilingual Mandarin/Taiwanese lexicons. The Right-ContextDependent (RCD) phonetic continuous-density Hidden ...

A professional impersonator has been studied when training his voice to mimic two target speakers. A three-fold investigation has been conducted; a computer-based speaker verification system was used, phonetic-acoustic measurements were made and a perception test was conducted. Our idea behind using this type of system is to measure how close to the target voice a professional impersonation mig...

The non-Romanized Mandarin Phonetic Symbols I (MPS1) system is a highly advantageous phonetic system for native English users studying Chinese Mandarin to learn, yet its steep initial learning curve discourages language programs to instead adopt Romanized phonetic systems. Computer-assisted language instruction (CALI) can greatly reduce this learning curve, in order to enable students to sooner...

This paper presents a novel combinational phonetic algorithm for Sindhi Language, to be used in developing Sindhi Spell Checker which has yet not been developed prior to this work. The compound textual forms and glyphs of Sindhi language presents a substantial challenge for developing Sindhi spell checker system and generating similar suggestion list for misspelled words. In order to implement ...

In this paper we propose the use of an HMM-based phonetic aligner together with a speech-synthesis-based one to improve the accuracy of the global alignment system. We also present a phone durationindependent measure to evaluate the accuracy of the automatic annotation tools. In the second part of the paper we propose and evaluate some new confidence measures for phonetic annotation.