A*-admissible heuristics for rapid lexical access

A new class of A* algorithms for Viterbi phonetic decoding subject to lexical constraints is presented. This type of algorithm can be made to run substantially faster than the Viterbi algorithm in an isolated word recognizer having a vocabulary of 1600 words. In addition, multiple recognition hypotheses can be generated on demand and the search can be constrained in respect conditions on phone durations in such a way that computational requirements are substantially reduced. Results are presented on a 60000-word recognition task.<
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