Joint Word Segmentation and Phonetic Category Induction

Micha Elsner, Stephanie Antetomaso, Naomi Feldman

Abstract: We describe a model which jointly performs word segmentation and induces vowel categories from formant values. Vowel induction performance improves slightly over a baseline model which does not segment; segmentation performance decreases slightly from a baseline using entirely symbolic input. Our high joint performance in this idealized setting implies that problems in unsupervised speech recognition reflect the phonetic variability of real speech sounds in context.