Extraction of phonemic variation rules in continuous speech spoken by multiple speakers

This paper describes an interactive extraction of phonemic variation rules in continuous speech spoken by multiple speakers. To realize a continuous speech recognizer, we must first develop a highly accurate phoneme recognizer. The major problem related to phoneme recognizers is the phonemic variations in continuous speech. Our work focuses on the interactive analysis of phonemic variations in continuous speech and the extraction of the phonemic variation rules for many speakers. We extracted 317 rules related to 21 kinds of phonemic variation phenomena from 10,000 Japanese-language phrases spoken by 10 male speakers. With these rules, 97.6% of 36,000 Japanese-language phrases spoken by 36 test speakers (30 males and 6 females) were correctly segmented by our top-down phoneme segmentation system. Furthermore, a subset of the rules for each speaker was automatically obtained. On average, each subset contains 53.2% of the rules.