The Integration of Phonetic Knowledge in Speech Technology

Continued progress in Speech Technology in the face of ever-increasing demands on the performance levels of applications is a challenge to the whole speech and language science community. Robust recognition and understanding of spontaneous speech in varied environments, good comprehensibility and naturalness of expressive speech synthesis are goals that cannot be achieved without a change of paradigm. This book argues for interdisciplinary communication and cooperation in problem-solving in general, and discusses the interaction between speech and language engineering and phonetics in particular. With a number of reports on innovative speech technology research as well as more theoretical discussions, it addresses the practical, scientific and sometimes the philosophical problems that stand in the way of cross-disciplinary collaboration and illuminates some of the many possible ways forward. Contents: William J. Barry, Wim A. v. Dommelen & Jacques Koreman: Phonetic knowledge in speech technology � and phonetic knowledge from speech technology? William A. Ainsworth: Can phonetic knowledge be used to improve the performance of speech recognisers and synthesisers? Anton Batliner & Bernd Möbius: Prosodic models, automatic speech understanding, and speech synthesis: Towards the common ground? Julie Carson-Berndsen & Michael Walsh: Phonetic time maps. Defining constraints for multilinear speech processing. Heidi Christensen, Børge Lindberg & Ove Andersen: Introducing phonetically motivated, heterogeneous information into automatic speech recognition. Guillaume Gravier, Francois Yvon, Bruno Jacob & Frédéric Bimbot: Introducing contextual transcription rules in large vocabulary speech recognition. Steven Greenberg: From here to utility. Melding phonetic insight with speech technology. Moisés Pastor & Francisco Casacuberta: Pronunciation modeling. Automatic learning of finite-state automata. Jan P. H. van Santen: Phonetic knowledge in text-to-speech synthesis. Helmer Strik: Is phonetic knowledge of any use for speech technology?