Analyzing Phonetic Confusions using Formal Concept Analysis Articles uri icon

publication date

  • September 2010

start page

  • 1377

end page

  • 1390

issue

  • 3

volume

  • 128

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

  • 0001-4966

Electronic International Standard Serial Number (EISSN)

  • 1520-8524

abstract

  • Confusion matrices have been used as a tool for the analysis of speech perception or human speech recognition (HSR) for decades. However, they are rarely employed in automatic speech recognition (ASR) mainly due to
    the lack of a systematic procedure for their exploration. The
    generalization of formal concept analysis employed in this paper
    provides a conceptual interpretation of confusion matrices that enables
    the analysis of the structure of confusions for both human and machine
    performances. Generalized formal concept analysis transforms confusion
    matrices into ordered lattices of confusion events, supporting classic
    results in HSR that identify a hierarchy of virtual
    articulatory-acoustic channels. Translating this technique into ASR, a
    detailed map of the relationships among the speech units employed in the
    system can be traced to make different sources of confusions apparent:
    the influence of the lexicon, segmentation errors, dialectal variations
    or limitations of the feature extraction procedures, among others.