INTERSPEECH 2009
10th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association

Brighton, United Kingdom
September 6-10, 2009

Investigating Phonetic Information Reduction and Lexical Confusability

William Hartmann, Eric Fosler-Lussier

Ohio State University, USA

In the presence of pronunciation variation and the masking effects of additive noise, we investigate the role of phonetic information reduction and lexical confusability on ASR performance. Contrary to previous work [1], we show that place of articulation as a representation for unstressed segments performs at least as well as manner of articulation in the presence of additive noise. Methods of phonetic reduction introduce lexical confusibility which negatively impact performance. By limiting this confusability, recognizers that employ high levels of phonetic reduction (40.1%) can perform as well a baseline system in the presence of nonstationary noise.

Reference

  1. E. J. Briscoe, “Lexical access in connected speech recognition.” Proceedings of the 27th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguists, 1989, pp. 84–90.

Full Paper

Bibliographic reference.  Hartmann, William / Fosler-Lussier, Eric (2009): "Investigating phonetic information reduction and lexical confusability", In INTERSPEECH-2009, 1659-1662.