Two-level modelling of speech variant rules

This paper describes a phonetic knowledge base for German consisting of a set of speech variant rules. These rules have been established on the basis of empirical, corpus-based investigations enriched by linguistic generalisations. Theoretical and computational foundations of speech variant rules are discussed, and their practical application in a linguistic word recognition system (BELLEx3, U Bielefeld) is demonstrated. Although the speech variant rules described in this paper have been established for the purpose of knowledge-based word recognition, their declarative implementation in a two-level transducer enables them to be employed for both recognition and generation of speech variants. Finally, an extension of standard two-level techniques is described whereby two-level transducers defining constraints on mapping relations between input and output forms are integrated with wellformedness-constraints on input forms stated in terms of finite-state automata

Event relations at the phonetics/phonology interface

Carson-Berndsen J, Gibbon D. Event relations at the phonetics/phonology interface. In: COLING '92: Proceedings of the 14th conference on Computational linguistics. Vol 4. Morristown, NJ, USA: Association for Computational Linguistics; 1992: 1269–1273

Event Relations At The Phonetics/phonology Interface

this paper a procedure for the construction of event relations at the phonetics/phonology interface is presented. The approach goes further than previous formal interpretations of autosegmental phonology in that phonological relations are explicitly related to intervals in actual speech signals as required by a speech recognition system. An event structure containing the temporal relations of overlap, precedence and inclusion is automatically constructed on the basis of an event lattice with time annotations derived from the speech signal. The event structure can be interpreted linguistically as an autosegmental representation with assimilation, long components or coarticulation. The theoretical interest of this work lies in its contribution to the solution of the projection problem in speech recognition, since a rigid mapping to segments is not required