00100			Speech Recognition
00150	
00200	There is an active  project  on  Speech  Recognition  with  the  main
00300	emphasis  having  to  do  with,  1)  the  extraction  of phonetically
00400	significant information from the acoustic signal and 2) the use of  a
00500	machine  learning scheme for correlating these acoustic data with the
00600	linguistic content of the utterance.
00700	
00800	Possible student projects might be-
00900	
01000	1. The development of a routine for the extraction of any  one  of  a
01100	number  of  different significant features of the acoustic wave. This
01200	would involve a literature search relating to what has been done, the
01300	development  of  a  proposed scheme to overcome the objections to the
01400	best that has been done, the writing of code  to  implement  the  new
01500	idea  and  the  testing of this code on our existing corpus of speech
01600	data.
01700	
01800	2. Assistance in the work of  annotating  our  increasing  corpus  of
01900	speech  data  so  that it can be used for machine learning runs. This
02000	would force the student to become conversant  with  the  conventional
02100	phonetic symbols, with our particular variations to these conventions
02200	which have been made to relate  them  more  directly  to  the  actual
02300	acoustic  signals and he would have to add to our library of routines
02400	for the easy manipulation of speech files and for the linking of  the
02500	lists of phonetic symbols with the acoustic data.
02600	
02700	3.  The  refinement and possible improvement of the present Signature
02800	Table approach to machine learning as applied to speech  recognition,
02900	or  the development of an entirely new method to replace the existing
03000	one. This would be a rather ambitious project  but  it  could  easily
03100	lead to a very good thesis topic.
03200	
03300	4. The study of the effects of context on the acoustic representation
03400	of intended phonetic utterances and the  development  of  methods  to
03500	make use of these contextual modifications as an aid to understanding
03600	the phonetic intent.