In this paper, we introduce the demiphone as a context-dependent phonetic unit for continuous speech recognition. A phoneme is divided into two parts: a left demiphone that accounts for the left coarticulation and a right demiphone that copes with the right-hand side context. This unit discards the dependence between the effects of both side contexts, but it models the transition between phonemes as the triphone does. By concatenating a left demiphone and a right demiphone a triphone can be built, although the left and the right-context coarticulations are modeled independently. The main appeal of this unit stems from its reduced number (respect to the number of triphones) and its capability to model left and right contexts unseen together in the training material. Thus, the demiphone shares in a simple way the advantages of a smoothed parameter estimation with the ability of generalization. In the present work, the demiphone is motivated and experimentally supported. Furthermore, demiphones are compared with triphones smoothed and generalized by decision-tree state-tying, accepted as the most powerful tool for coarticulation modeling at the present state of the art. The main conclusion of our work is that the demiphone simplifies the recognition system and yields a better performance than the triphone, at least for small or moderate size databases. This result may be explained by the ability of the demiphone to provide an excellent trade-off between a detailed coarticulation modeling and a proper parameter estimation.

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