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From: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Practical effects of AI (speech)
Message-ID: <2543@dciem.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 18-Nov-87 18:14:14 EST
Article-I.D.: dciem.2543
Posted: Wed Nov 18 18:14:14 1987
Date-Received: Fri, 20-Nov-87 23:42:22 EST
References: <12@gollum.Columbia.NCR.COM> <267@PT.CS.CMU.EDU> <244@usl-pc.UUCP> <1126@uhccux.UUCP>
Reply-To: mmt@dciem.UUCP (Martin Taylor)
Organization: D.C.I.E.M., Toronto, Canada
Lines: 38
Keywords: ai future effects
Summary: 


--        I suppose that applying AI to speech recognition would involve
--making use of what we know about the perceptual and cognitive nature
--of language sound-structures -- i.e. the results of phonology.  I don't
--know that this has ever been tried.  If it has, could someone supply
--references?  I'd be very interested to know what has been done in this
--direction.
--                Greg Lee, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu

I have been unable in a quick search to come up with exact references,
but Alinat, working at Thomson-DASM in Cros-de-Cagnes, France, has had
quite successful results using the phonological structure of French
as his basic database.  As I remember it, he does a quick-and-dirty
analysis of the phonetic structure of the incoming speech signal
(classes in order of preference), and then uses fairly complex
phonotactic rules along with the (fairly strict) syntax of the
permitted sentence structure to produce rather good talker-independent
results for native French talkers.  Non-native but reasonably
fluent talkers are not well recognized, probably because they
don't conform to the French phonotactic rules.  Alinat was working
essentially alone for a long time, but I understand he is now cooperating
with CRIN at the University of Nancy.


All the above is from memory, so details may be wrong.  If I find
the references, I'll post them.  If you are really interested, you
should be able to get hold of Alinat from the information above
(except I'm not sure whether it may be Cagnes-sur-Mer rather than
Cros de Cagnes; they are contiguous).
-- 

Martin Taylor
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mmt@zorac.arpa
Magic is just advanced technology ... so is intelligence.  Before computers,
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