An Incremental Implementation of the Utterance-Boundary Approach to Speech Segmentation

The problem of speech segmentation is a well-known challenge for various studies, such as language acquisition: how do children correctly infer the position of word boundaries in the continuous stream of speech? One solution to this problem, referred to as the utterance-boundary strategy, is to reuse the information provided by the occurrence of specific phonemes sequences at utterance edges in order to hypothesize boundaries inside utterances. In this paper, we describe a probabilistic and incremental implementation of this approach and discuss the results observed for a word segmentation task on a phonemically transcribed and child-oriented French corpus. We show in particular that the first boundaries inferred by this algorithm seem to be reliable enough to make useful generalizations for later decisions