Application-oriented validation o preliminary r

There is an increasing need for automatic procedures to generate and validate phonetic transcriptions. As the production of manual phonetic transcriptions tends to be time-consuming, error-prone and costly, procedures have been developed to derive phonetic transcriptions automatically by means of automatic speech recognition technology. Such automatic phonetic transcriptions are usually validated by comparing them with manual phonetic transcriptions. Even though this appears to be a plausible procedure at first sight, it might be troublesome. We believe that phonetic transcriptions should ideally be validated with potential applications in mind. The application focused on in this paper is the reduction of word error rates in automatic speech recognition.