Prosodic Aids to Speech Recognition: 5. A Summary of Results to Date
Abstract
Prosodic features are used to detect boundaries between phrases, then stressed syllables are located within each phrase, and a partial distinctive features analysis is done within stressed syllables. Experiments showed that listeners' perceptions of stressed syllables were quite consistent, and corresponded closely to the locations of stressed syllables obtained from prosodic features. Analysis of phonetic recognition results by several research groups showed that automatic phone categorization is much more accurate in stressed syllables. Studies sho Studies showed that stressed vowels in several recorded texts tended to be roughly equally spaced in time, but the number of intervening unstressed syllables had a much more prominent effect on interstress interval than might have been expected from published hypotheses. Prosodic features appear to be potentially useful for providing cues to sentence type, syntactic bracketing, occurrences of coordination and subordination, and specific semantic structures. Preliminary studies of some sentences that gave problems to speech understanding systems showed that prosodies do differ in yes/ no questions versus commands, and that ambiguous syntactic structures can be disambiguated from prosodic patterns. A set of speech texts have been designed for careful analysis of the effects on prosodic patterns due to various contrasts in syntactic structure, semantics, stress patterns, and phonetic sequences.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Oct 31, 1974
- Accession Number
- ADA003931
Entities
People
- Wayne A. Lea
Organizations
- Sperry Corporation