Speech Sound Discrimination with Genetic Programming

The question that we investigate in this paper is, whether it is possible for Genetic Programming to extract certain regularities from raw time series data of human speech. We examine whether a genetic programming algorithm can find programs that are able to discriminate certain spoken vowels and consonants. We present evidence that this can indeed be achieved with a surprisingly simple approach that does not need preprocessing. The data we have collected on the system’s behavior show that even speaker-independent discrimination is possible with GP.