An expert spectrogram reader: A knowledge-based approach to speech recognition

Human experts can determine the phonetic identity of unknown utterances from a visual examination of the spectrogram with performance better than available computer systems. The spectrogram-reading process involves the use of multiple sources of knowledge, including articulatory movements, acoustic phonetics, phonotactics, and linguistics. In addition, the experts' performance can be attributed to their ability to deal with partial and/or conflicting information, as well as multiple cues. This paper investigates the feasibility of constructing a knowledge-based system that mimics the process of spectrogram reading by humans. In a task of identifying stop consonants extracted from continuous speech, the system achieved performance that is comparable to that of the experts.