CRITIQUE - THE POTENTIAL ROLE OF SPEECH PRODUCTION MODELS IN AUTOMATIC SPEECH RECOGNITION

This paper presents a critique (by a ''speech technologist'') of ''The potential role of speech production models in automatic speech recogn ition'' by R. C. Rose, J. Schroeter, and M. M. Sondhi which was presen ted at the 1994 ASA Special Session on ''Speech Recognition and Percep tion from an Articulatory Point of View.'' While in general agreement with the points raised in the Rose paper, this article focuses on issu es such as (a) whether articulatory information should be ''recovered' ' as part of a recognition process as opposed to that process being '' constrained'' by articulatory information, (b) how optimum recognition performance is achieved by compromising the ''quality'' of the underl ying generative model, and (c) if recent developments in speech patter n modeling will lead to more powerful generative models of speech. Fin ally, it is noted that the special session highlighted the fact that a convergence is long overdue between the speech science and speech tec hnology communities toward common (mathematically and computationally based) theories of ''speech pattern processing.''