TECHNIQUE FOR DEVELOPING DISCRIMINATIVE SOUND UNITS FOR SPEECH RECOGNITION AND ALLOPHONE MODELING

A set of models is developed to represent sound units and these models are then used with the incorrect sound units to determine which generate high likelihood scores. The models generating high likelihood scores for the incorrect sound units represent those that are more likely to be confused. The resulting confusability data may then be used in generating more discriminative speech models and in subsequent pruning of the acoustic decision tree. The confusability data may also be used to develop confusability predictors used for rejection during search and in developing continuous speech recognition models that are optimized to minimize confusability.