Abstract

This paper explores the use of the phone and syllable as primary units of representation in the rst stage of a two-stage recognizer. A nite-state transducer speech recognizer is utilized to congure the recognition as a twostage process, where either phone or syllable graphs are computed in the rst stage, and passed to the second stage to determine the most likely word hypotheses. Preliminary experiments in a weather information speech understanding domain show that a syllable representation with either bigram or trigram language models provides more constraint than a phonetic representation with a higher-order n-gram language model (up to a 6-gram), and approaches the performance of a more conventional single-stage word-based conguration. 1. INTRODUCTION Most conventional speech recognition systems represent the search space as a directed graph of phone-like units. These graphs are typically determined by the allowable pronunciations of a given word vocabulary, with word (and th...

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