Continuous speech recognition from a phonetic transcription

Abstract

A long-standing and widely accepted linguistic theory of speech recognition holds that natural spoken messages are understood on the basis of an intermediate representation of the acoustic signal in terms of a small number of phonetic symbols. The traditional linguistic theory is very attractive for several reasons. First, it provides a natural way to partition the process of communication by spoken language into distinct acoustic, phonetic, lexical and syntactic sub-processes. Second, it provides for a reduction in bandwidth at each successive stage of the process. And, finally, it seems to be reflected in the development of written language. It is thus not surprising that this seminal idea formed the basis for several early speech recognition machines [1, 2, 3, 4].