Computational Tools for the Development of Event Phonologies

In this paper interactive computational phonological tools are presented, which were developed as part of the UBI-Linguistic Word Modelling Development Environment (cf. Appendix) in connection with the project Verbmobil-ASL-Nord (Architectures for Speech and Language Systems, Sub-area: Linguistic Word Modelling). This paper is concerned primarily with the phonological component of the ASL speech recogition system and in particular with the generation of top-down phonological event predictions at the phonetics/phonology interface. In both the phonetic and the phonological components of the ASL-Nord system, the event concept plays an important role. The tools presented in this paper are intended for use in a multi-lingual context and although their motivation lies in the need for top-down hypotheses at the phonetics/phonology interface, an additional interest lies in their contribution to multi-tier prosodic labelling.