This book is concerned with the automatic generation of inheritance hierarchies for the level
below the phoneme and their application in acoustic modelling for automatic speech recognition.
Over the last decade computational phonology has adopted the typed feature structure
representation formalism while paying little attention to subphonetic feature structures.
Similarly paradigmatic phonological knowledge used in acoustic modelling does usually not go
beyond phonological feature bundles. Here the discrepancy between hierarchically-structured
lexica as they are promoted in computational phonology and the flat-structured feature bundles
common in acoustic modelling is addressed in a powerful framework for solving combinatorial
problems i.e. constraint programming.
