Phoneme Recognition Using Acoustic Events

This paper presents a new approach to phoneme recognition using nonsequential sub--phoneme units. These units are called acoustic events and are phonologically meaningful as well as recognizable from speech signals. Acoustic events form a phonologically incomplete representation as compared to distinctive features. This problem may partly be overcome by incorporating phonological constraints. Currently, 24 binary events describing manner and place of articulation, vowel quality and voicing are used to recognize all German phonemes. Phoneme recognition in this paradigm consists of two steps: After the acoustic events have been determined from the speech signal, a phonological parser is used to generate syllable and phoneme hypotheses from the event lattice. Results obtained on a speaker--dependent corpus are presented.