Knowledge-Based and Expert Systems in Automatic Speech Recognition

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently advanced to the point that practical applications are now existing in several domains. Most of the results obtained are not due to general problem solving techniques but to the use of specific, domain-dependent knowledge. Formalizing and incorporating specific knowledge into a system makes it possible to reach the level of expertise comparable to that of a human expert in some specialized field. Such knowledge-based and expert systems have been extensively used in various domains like chemistry, medicine, geology, etc. The basic idea in these systems is to clearly distinguish between the knowledge base which usually incorporates rules and meta-rules about the domain of expertise and the control structures which manipulate this knowledge. That ensures great modularity and flexibility and makes it easy to modify and update a system [11].