Automatic Phonetic Transcription of Non-Prompted Speech

Abstract

A reliable method for automatic phonetic transcription of nonprompted German speech has been developed at the Department of Phonetics, University of Munich.This "Munich Automatic Segmentation" (MAUS) system labels and segments the phonetic constituents of spoken German in a manner similar to highly trained phoneticians.MAUS has been used to train automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems as well as to provide detailed statistical analyses of spontaneous speech (using the Verbmobil I and RVG I corpora).The MAUS system is a reliable, automatic means of testing linguistic hypotheses concerning the phonetic properties of spontaneous speech and should therefore play an important role in providing the sort of empirical data required to develop more realistic models of spoken language.