Evidence for the strength of the relationship between Automatic Speech Recognition and Phoneme Alignment performance

It might be naïvely assumed that the performance of an Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) system, and that of an Automatic Speech-to-Phoneme Alignment (ASPA) system using the same acoustic-phonetic models, would be closely related. However many researchers believe this relationship to be, at best weak - but this belief has not previously been tested in an objective and quantitative manner. This paper quantifies the strength of the relationship using analysis of data without reference to manually defined alignment labels. By avoiding comparison with a set of reference labels, both the ASR and the ASPA systems can be considered equivalent, removing any bias due to any difference of “opinion” between the human labeller and the automatic system.