DIKRAN@SU-CSLI.ARPA (08/02/84)
From: Dikran Karagueuzian <DIKRAN@SU-CSLI.ARPA>
[Forwarded from the CSLI Newsletter by Laws@SRI-AI.]
LEXICAL ACCESS USING PARTIAL INFORMATION
By Daniel P. Huttenlocher, Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, Friday, August 3, 2 p.m. in the Trailers'
Conference Room next to Ventura Hall.
ABSTRACT: Current approaches to speech recognition rely on classical
pattern matching techniques which utilize little or no language knowledge.
We have recently proposed a model of word recognition which uses
speech-specific knowledge to access words on the basis of partial
information. These partial descriptions serve to partition a large lexicon
into small equivalence classes using sequential phonetic and prosodic
constraints. The representation is attractive for speech recognition system
because it allows all but a small number of word candidates to be excluded
using only a crude description of the acoustic signal. For example, if the
word ``splint'' is represented according to the broad phonetic string
[fricative][stop][liquid][vowel][nasal][stop], there are only two matching
words in the 20,000 word Webster's Pocket Dictionary, ``splint'' and ``sprint.''
Thus, a partial representation can both greatly reduce the space of possible
word candidates, and be relatively insensitive to variability in the speech
signal across utterance situations. This talk will discuss a set of studies
examining the power of such partial lexical representations.