A multilingual phonetic representation and analysis system for different speech databases

A multilingual phonetic representation and analysis system for different speech databases is presented. The need for such a system is first justified and then one is proposed based on the Worldbet phonetic alphabet. A phonetic class hierarchy is developed and a description of the hierarchical structural representation follows. Database access is based on the latter and is accomplished by defining predicate search functions and applying them to a database. Immediate signal analysis of the results is possible since the multilingual phonetic representation system is seamlessly integrated into a digital signal processing environment.