Interaction between stochastic modeling and knowledge-based techniques in acoustic-phonetic decoding of speech

We present in this paper a new approach to acoustic-phonetic decoding of continuous speech that consists of integrating the two most promising present techniques in the field, i.e. stochastic modeling and knowledge-based expert systems. Our group has been developing several systems based on these two techniques during the past 15 years or so. Our present goal is to mix both in order to improve the overall quality of automatic phonetic decoding. This paper is concerned with the first developments of the project. We first present the main characteristics of the components of the system and its general architecture. We also present and discuss preliminary results concerning the segmentation of the speech wave into phonetic units and the gross labeling of these segments.