Representation of Segments

It is commonly agreed that there are two types of cues: those that vary a great deal with context (e.g., aspiration, retroflex, glottalization) and those that are relatively invariant to context (e.g., voicing, place, manner). The parsing and matching design proposed above is intended to take advantage of both types of cues in a uniform and modular fashion. The parser uses variant cues in order to locate suprasegmental constituents. Having found these constituents, the matcher canonicalizes them into sequences of invariant phonemic-like feature bundles and then looks them up in the lexicon to find word candidates.