Data-driven approaches to articulatory speech processing

Is it possible to recover movements of the vocal tract shape of the subject from arbitrary but normal speech acoustics? This problem is formally known as acoustic-to-articulatory mapping or articulatory inversion. A successful solution to this long standing and unsolved problem can facilitate useful applications in vocal tract visualization, language learning, speech therapy, and improve state-of-art recognition, speech synthesis, speech coding. It is known as the signature problem in articulatory speech processing, which aims to integrate explicitly human speech production knowledge into acoustics based speech technologies--Abstract