Acoustic segmentation and phonetic classification in the SUMMIT system

Recently, the authors initiated a project to develop a phonetically-based spoken-language-understanding system called SUMMIT. In contrast to many of the past efforts that make use of heuristic rules whose development requires intense knowledge engineering, their approach attempts to express the speech knowledge within a formal framework using well-defined mathematical tools. In the authors' system, features and decision strategies are discovered and trained automatically, using a large body of speech data. The authors describe those parts of the system dealing with acoustic segmentation and phonetic classification and document its current performance.>