Investigating phonetic information reduction and lexical confusability

In the presence of pronunciation variation and the masking ef-fects of additive noise, we investigate the role of phonetic in-formation reduction and lexical confusability on ASR perfor-mance. Contrary to previous work [1], we show that place of ar-ticulation as a representation for unstressed segments performs at least as well as manner of articulation in the presence of ad-ditive noise. Methods of phonetic reduction introduce lexical confusibility which negatively impact performance. By limiting this confusability, recognizers that employ high levels of pho-netic reduction (40.1%) can perform as well a baseline system in the presence of nonstationary noise. Index Terms: spoken language analysis, speech recognition, articulatory feature