Exploiting speech production information for automatic speech and speaker modeling and recognition - possibilities and new opportunities

We consider the potential for incorporating direct, or inferred, speech production knowledge in speech technology development. We first review the technologies that can be used to capture speech articulation information. We discuss how meaningful (speech and speaker) representations can be derived from articulatory data thus captured and further how they can be estimated from the acoustics in the absence of these direct measurements. We present some applications that have used speech production information to further the state of the art in automatic speech and speaker recognition. We also offer an outlook on how such knowledge and applications can in turn inform scientific understanding of the human speech communication process.