Interpreting Multilinear Representations in Speech

This paper discusses the interpretation of multilinear representations of speech utterances using a computational linguistic model. The model uses a feature-based finite state automaton representation of phonotactic constraints and axioms of event logic to provide a multilinear representation with a temporal interpretation. The asynchronous nature of the features in multilinear representations allows coarticulation to be modeled and the phonotactic automaton representation of permissible sound combinations in a language allows not only actual but also potential (well-formed) syllable structures to be recognised. The paper illustrates how a computational linguistic model can provide a robust solution to the problems of coarticulation and out-of-vocabulary items in speech recognition.