Automatic generation of phonological variations

A recognition system must include structures which accoupt f?r ~he di~feren~ aspects of. possible phonological vanab1hty m the mcommg speech s1gnal. To aid in dealing with variability at the phonological level, a grapheme-toseveral-phoneme strings module, V ARIONO, has been developed at LIMSI. Tests of this system showed the necess1ty of creating a hierarchical structure to order phon<?lo~ica~ var~ations, according to a fixed set of criteria, ehmmatmg mfrequent phenomena, thus bringing the number of possible strings down to a reasonable size. The resulting new module, V ARION1, was tested on transciptio~s of recorded speech (BDSONS-30 speakers and a vanable speech rate database).