Convolutional Neural Networks for Raw Speech Recognition

State-of-the-art automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems map the speech signal into its corresponding text. Traditional ASR systems are based on Gaussian mixture model. The emergence of deep learning drastically improved the recognition rate of ASR systems. Such systems are replacing traditional ASR systems. These systems can also be trained in end-to-end manner. End-to-end ASR systems are gaining much popularity due to simplified model-building process and abilities to directly map speech into the text without any predefined alignments. Three major types of end-to-end architectures for ASR are attention-based methods, connectionist temporal classification, and convolutional neural network (CNN)-based direct raw speech model. In this chapter, CNN-based acoustic model for raw speech signal is discussed. It establishes the relation between raw speech signal and phones in a data-driven manner. Relevant features and classifier both are jointly learned from the raw speech. Raw speech is processed by first convolutional layer to learn the feature representation. The output of first convolutional layer, that is, intermediate representation, is more discriminative and further processed by rest convolutional layers. This system uses only few parameters and performs better than traditional cepstral feature-based systems. The performance of the system is evaluated for TIMIT and claimed similar performance as MFCC