This paper presents a testbed for developing multilingual phonotactic descriptions that employs finite state methods to represent the phonotactics of one or more languages. The motivation for this work is to make an extensive range of phonotactic descriptions of varying granularity available for speech technology applications. We discuss the design of the phonotactic testbed and how various modules may be used to generate finite state phonotactic descriptions. We provide an example multilingual application drawn from a partial sample of onset clusters spanning four language families, demonstrating how the commonalities of a broad spectrum of languages can be expressed using individual and generic phonotactic automata. We then discuss how these representations are extended via a three-tiered model to provide the basis for the feature- and event-based phonotactic automata.

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Bibliographic reference.  Ashby, Simone / Carson-Berndsen, Julie / Joue, Gina (2001): "A testbed for developing multilingual phonotactic descriptions", In EUROSPEECH-2001, 321-324.