Time Map Phonology

This book is a revised version of my doctoral thesis which was submitted in April 1993. The main extension is a chapter on evaluation of the system de scribed in Chapter 8 as this is clearly an issue which was not treated in the original version. This required the collection of data, the development of a concept for diagnostic evaluation of linguistic word recognition systems and, of course, the actual evaluation of the system itself. The revisions made primarily concern the presentation of the latest version of the SILPA system described in an additional Subsection 8. 3, the development environment for SILPA in Sec tion 8. 4, the diagnostic evaluation of the system as an additional Chapter 9. Some updates are included in the discussion of phonology and computation in Chapter 2 and finite state techniques in computational phonology in Chapter 3. The thesis was designed primarily as a contribution to the area of compu tational phonology. However, it addresses issues which are relevant within the disciplines of general linguistics, computational linguistics and, in particular, speech technology, in providing a detailed declarative, computationally inter preted linguistic model for application in spoken language processing. Time Map Phonology is a novel, constraint-based approach based on a two-stage temporal interpretation of phonological categories as events.

Klappentext

Time Map Phonology addresses key areas of sound structure at which the two technologies of natural language processing and speech technology are beginning to converge. Solutions are presented to the problems of how to process words which have not been heard before and how to develop fine-grained knowledge representation and processing techniques for linguistic units smaller than the word. The solutions are based on a careful comparison of linguistic theories and on the investigation of computational techniques for the next generation of flexible spoken language input and output devices. The approach has been fully implemented for the vocabulary of German and subjected to quantitative evaluation.

Inhalt
1 Introduction.- 2 Phonology and Computation.- 3 Finite State Techniques in Computational Phonology.- 4 The Event Concept in Time Map Phonology.- 5 Phonotactic Descriptions and Their Representation.- 6 Excursus: Constraint-Based Segmental Phonological Parsing.- 7 Constraint-Based Phonological Parsing: An Event-Based Approach.- 8 SILPA.- 9 Evaluation.- 10 Conclusion.- Appendix A Sampa Phonetic Alphabet for German.- Appendix B The Chomsky Hierarchy.- Appendix C Event-Based Phonotactic Network for German.