INCORPORATING CONTEXTUAL PHONETICS INTO AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION
This work outlines the problems encountered in modeling pro-
nunciation for automatic speech recognition (ASR) of spontaneous
(American) English speech. We detail some of the phonetic phe-
nomena within the Switchboard corpus that make the recognition
of this speaking style difficult. Phonetic transcribers found that fea-
ture spreading and cue trading made identification of phonetic seg-
mental boundaries problematic. Including different forms of con-
text in pronunciation models, however, may alleviate these prob-
lems in the ASR domain. The syllable appears to play an im-
portant role, as many of the phonetic phenomena seen are sylla-
ble-internal, and the increase in pronunciation variation compared
to read speech is concentrated in coda...