Multiple agents, equipped with a feature-based phonetic model and a connectionist cognitive model, interact via the name game paradigm, such that lexicon formation and change is an emergent property of this complex adaptive system. Our system converges on a coherent lexicon and effective language change is demonstrated, even in the absence of population flux, a result which brings into question...

The first part of this paper describes the BBN system that participated in the 2004 broadcast news (BN) evaluation for Arabic. The complete system description is given together with experimental results on the 2004 development, and evaluation sets. Previous Arabic speech recognition at BBN used grapheme models due to the lack of short vowel information in the acoustic transcriptions. In the sec...

In this paper, we discuss an automatic event-based recognition system (EBS) that is based on phonetic feature theory and acoustic phonetics. First, acoustic events related to the manner phonetic features are extracted from the speech signal. Second, based on the manner acoustic events, information related to the place phonetic features and voicing are extracted. Most recently, we focused on pla...

1. Phonetic considerations in phonological research Phonology is concerned with characterizing the sound patterns of language, typically presented in terms of a system of contrastive sound elements (e.g., syllables, segments, features) and the distribution of those sounds in the makeup of phonological words and phrases. This focus on the sound system and the characteristic patterns that arise w...

This paper describes a novel method that models the correlation between acoustic observations in contiguous speech segments. The basic idea behind the method is that acoustic observations are conditioned not only on the phonetic context but also on the preceding acoustic segment observation. The correlation between consecutive acoustic observations is modeled by polynomial mean trajectory segme...

In this paper we investigate the use of broad phonetic class (BPC) models in a text independent speaker recognition task. These models can be used to bring down the variability due to the intrinsic differences between mutual phonetic classes in the speech material used for training of the speaker models. Combining BPC recognition with text independent speaker recognition moves a bit in the dire...

Unicode provides a single coding system for all scripts used in printing the languages of the world, and includes the entire International Phonetic Alphabet. A standard Unicode-based phonetic font is now routinely bundled with the software supplied for new personal computers. Unlike the situation four years ago, most current browsers, word-processing packages, fonts and printers support Unicode...

We report on an implemented grapheme-to-phoneme conversion architecture. Given a set of examples (spelling words with their associated phonetic representation) in a language, a grapheme-to-phoneme conversion system is automatically produced for that language which takes as its input the spelling of words, and produces as its output the phonetic transcription according to the rules implicit in t...

This paper presents a probabilistic phone mapping model (PPM) that makes possible automatic speech recognition using a foreign phonetic system. We formulate the training of the phone mapping model in the framework of maximum likelihood estimation. The model can be learned automatically from the reference phonetic transcript and the phonetic transcript resulting from a foreign phonetic recognise...

Text-to-speech conversion has traditionally been performed either by concatenating short samples of speech or by using rule-based systems to convert a phonetic representation of speech into an acoustic representation, which is then converted into speech. This paper describes a system that uses a time-delay neural network (TDNN) to perform this phonetic-to-acoustic mapping, with another neural n...