The Role of Acoustic Processing in Speech Understanding Systems

Abstract

The author discusses methods and problems of acoustic signal processing for systems to enable machines to understand spoken communication. Emphasis is on research outside of the ARPA-sponsored SUR (Speech Understanding Research) study. This acoustic level processing includes three steps, not necessarily distinct: (1) preprocessing the original analog signal or its digitized form by basic techniques such as amplitude compression; (2) analysis of the preprocessed signals using fast Fourier transformations, digital filtering, etc; and (3) parameterizing the results in phoneme-sized chunks by formats, autocorrelation techniques, etc. Problems include (1) environmental noise, (2) transducer limitations, (3) determining an appropriate parameterization technique, and (4) coping with wide phonetic, syntactic, and semantic variability of speech.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Oct 01, 1973
Accession Number
AD0777076

Entities

People

  • A. S. Hoffman

Organizations

  • RAND Corporation

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Acoustic Signals
  • Amplitude Modulation
  • Analyzers
  • Automated Speech Recognition
  • Classification
  • Computer Programming
  • Contractors
  • Data Rate
  • Information Processing
  • Measurement
  • Processing Equipment
  • Recognition
  • Reliability
  • Signal Processing
  • Speech Analysis
  • Speech Quality
  • Waveforms

Readers

  • Acoustical Oceanography.
  • Computational Linguistics
  • Speech Processing/Speech Recognition.