Redundancy analysis: A guide-line through speech recognition

The telephonic wave carries 50,000 bits/sec, but the brain accepts only 10 linguistic bits/ sec. How can we optimize such a 5000 : 1 transformation? The redundancy analysis of symbolic systems is proposed a a guide-line through the labyrinth of speech recognition. We distinguish the spectral and the symbolic information capacity (bit/sec), the negative entropy (bit/symbol), the acceptance rhythm (symbol/ sec), the redundancies and anti-redundancies (bit/bit), which characterize the relevant constraints, rules or knowledge sources. Redundancy analysis can detail prosodic components, such as dynamics, duration, pitch or voicing degree. It can be applied to various forms of connected, restricted or coded speech, with vocabularies ranging from small to large numbers of words.