Syllable-based acoustic-phonetic decoding and wordhypotheses generation in fluently spoken speech

The acoustic modul of the speech understanding system SPICOS which is designed as a German language man-machine-dialogue interface to a databank is described. Continuous speech is recognized in a speaker dependent mode using a syllabic approach. Each syllable is split acoustically into the phonetic units initial consonant clusters, syllabic nuclei and final consonant clusters. The lexicon contains 900 words. It is represented by a graph structure modelling different pronunciations of word strings and ambiguous segmentation of the speech signal into phonetic units.