Prosodic Aids to Speech Recognition. 4. A General Strategy for Prosodically-Guided Speech Understanding

A strategy is outlined for acoustic aspects of speech recognition, whereby prosodic features are used to detect boundaries between phrases, then stressed syllables are located within each constituent, and a partial distinctive features analysis is done within stressed syllable.

Abstract

Abstract : A strategy is outlined for acoustic aspects of speech recognition, whereby prosodic features are used to detect boundaries between phrases, then stressed syllables are located within each constituent, and a partial distinctive features analysis is done within stressed syllables. Analysis of phonetic recognition results by several research groups showed that automatic phone categorization is much more accurate in stressed syllables. Prosodic features appear to be potentially useful for providing cues to sentence type, syntactic bracketing, occurrences of coordination and subordination, and specific semantic structures. Preliminary acoustic analyses are then followed by an analysis-by-synthesis strategy.