Formalizing Knowledge Used in Spectrogram Reading: Acoustic and Perceptual Evidence from Stops
Abstract
Since the invention of the sound spectrograph in 1946 by Koenig, Dunn and Lacey, spectrograms have been widely used for speech research. Over the last decade there has been revived interest in the application of spectrogram reading toward continuous speech recognition. Spectrogram reading involves interpreting the acoustic patterns in the image to determine the spoken utterance. One must selectively attend to many different acoustic cues, interpret their significance in light of other evidence, and make inferences based on information from multiple sources. While early attempts at spectrogram reading met with limited success (Klatt and Stevens, 1973; Lindblom and Svenssen, 1973; Svenssen, 1974), Zue, in a series of experiments intended to illustrate the richness of phonetic information in the speech signal (Cole et al., 1980; Cole and Zue, 1980), demonstrated that high performance phonetic labeling of a spectrogram could be obtained. In this thesis a formal evaluation of spectrogram reading was conducted in order to obtain a better understanding of the process and to evaluate the ability of spectrogram readers. The research consisted of three main parts: an evaluation of spectrogram readers on a constrained task, a comparison to listeners on the same task, and a formalization of spectrogram- reading knowledge in a rule-based system.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Dec 01, 1988
- Accession Number
- ADA206826
Entities
People
- Lori F. Lamei
Organizations
- Massachusetts Institute of Technology