Robust Speech Recognition for Unknown Communication Channels Pont-à-Mousson, France April 17-18, 1997

Should Recognizers Have Ears?

Hynek Hermansky

Oregon Graduate Institute of Science & Technology, Portland, OR; International Computer Science Institute, Berkeley, CA, USA

The paper discusses author's experience with applying auditory knowledge to automatic recognition of speech. It indirectly argues against blind implementing of scattered accidental knowledge which may he irrelevant to a speech recognition task. It advances the notion that the reason for applying knowledge of human auditory perception in engineering applications should be the ability of perception to suppress some parts of information in the speech message. Three properties of human speech perception:

• limited spectral resolution,
• use of information from about syllable-length segments
• ability to alleviate unreliable cues,

are discussed in some detail. Overall, we are advocating selective use of auditory knowledge, optimized on real speech data.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Hermansky, Hynek (1997): "Should recognizers have ears?", In RSR-1997, 1-10.