Abstract
Technology and science are often perceived as polar extremes with respect to spoken language. Speech applications rarely incorporate scientific insight and conversely, basic research is often viewed as oblivious to practical concerns of the real world. Melding phonetic insight with speech technology can, however, yield extremely productive results for both applications and basic science if performed within the appropriate theoretical framework. Such an approach is illustrated with respect to the relation between prosodic (stress accent) and phonetic properties of conversational telephone dialogues (American English) using the Switchboard corpus. Phonetic properties, such as vocalic identity and duration, are shown to reflect prosodic phenomena, and thus could be used to enhance the quality of automatic speech recognition performance, as well as provide detailed insight into the nature of spoken language.
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Greenberg, S. (2005). From Here to Utility. In: Barry, W.J., van Dommelen, W.A. (eds) The Integration of Phonetic Knowledge in Speech Technology. Text, Speech and Language Technology, vol 25. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-2637-4_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-2637-4_7
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