Integrating syllable boundary information into speech recognition

We examine the proposition that knowledge of the timing of syllabic onsets may be useful in improving the performance of speech recognition systems. A method of estimating the location of syllable onsets derived from the analysis of energy trajectories in critical band channels has been developed, and a syllable-based decoder has been designed and implemented that incorporates this onset information into the speech recognition process. For a small, continuous speech recognition task the addition of artificial syllabic onset information (derived from advance knowledge of the word transcriptions) lowers the word error rate by 38%. Incorporating acoustically-derived syllabic onset information reduces the word error rate by 10% on the same task. The latter experiment has highlighted representational issues on coordinating acoustic and lexical syllabifications, a topic we are beginning to explore.