Inference of a knowledge source for the recognition of nasals in continuous speech

A system for the automatic recognition of bilabial /m/ and alveolar /n/ in vowel-consonant-vowel utterances extracted from continuous speech is presented. It is based on a syntactic pattern recognition approach and the use of fuzzy relations for evaluating phonemic hypotheses. The knowledge source, based on very simple transition networks with associated simple semantic rules, is inferred from experiments. Results obtained for four male speakers are presented together with an acoustic-phonetic motivation of the approach used. These show how accounting for coarticulation effects gives substantially better performances than previous approaches.