Speech recognition via phonetically featured syllables

We describe a speech recogniser which uses a speech production-motivated phonetic-feature description of speech. We argue that this is a natural way to describe the speech signal and offers an efficient intermediate parameterisation for use in speech recogni-tion. We also propose to model this description at the syllable rather than phone level. The ultimate goal of this work is to generate syllable models whose parameters explicitly describe the trajectories of the pho-netic features of the syllable. We hope to move away from Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) of context-dependent phone units. As a step towards this, we present a preliminary system which consists of two parts: recognition of the phonetic features from the speech signal using a neural network; and decoding of the feature-based description into phonemes using HMMs. 1