Two Automatic Approaches for Analyzing Connected Speech Processes in Dutch

Abstract

This paper describes two automatic approaches used to study connected speech processes (CSPs) in Dutch. The first approach was from a linguistic point of view - the top-down method. This method can be used for verification of hypotheses about CSPs. The second approach - the bottom-up method -uses a constrained phone recognizer to generate phone transcriptions. An alignment was carried out between the two transcriptions and a reference transcription. A comparison between the two methods showed that 68% agreement was achieved on the CSPs. Although phone accuracy is only 63%, the bottom-up approach is useful for studying CSPs. From the data generated using the bottom-up method, indications of which CSPs are present in the material can be found. These indications can be used to generate hypotheses which can then be tested using the top-down method.