An application hierarchy for heuristic rules in automatic phonemic segmentation of continuous speech

In Automatic Recognition of Continuous Speech (ARCS), one approach is to segment the speech continuum approximately at the phoneme level as an initial step in abstracting lexical and/or sementic content. If heuristic rules are used for this segmentation, the order of rule application and the character of the data to be used by the rules become important considerations. The rationale for and some examples from an application hierarchy and a recognition-then-segmentation approach will be presented; this approach has been used fairly successfully in phonemic segmentation of continuous speech.