"Blind" speech segmentation: automatic segmentation of speech without linguistic knowledge

A new automatic speech segmentation procedure, called the "Blind" speech segmentation, is presented. This procedure allows a speech sample to be segmented into sub-word units without the knowledge of any linguistic information (such as, orthographic or phonetic transcription). Hence, this procedure involves finding the optimal number of sub-word segments in the given speech sample, before locating the sub-word segment boundaries.