Transitional speech units and their representation by regressive Markov states: applications to speech recognition

Transitional speech units for American English are proposed and constructed via assimilation of active articulatory features. The effectiveness of a feature-based system exploiting the transitional speech units is demonstrated in evaluation experiments, where the new system with use of quadratic regressive states is shown to achieve error rate reduction of 21% compared with the system using only static subphonemic units.