Monolingual and bilingual spanish-catalan speech recognizers developed from SpeechDat databases

Under the SpeechDat specifications, the Spanish member of SpeechDat consortium has recorded a Catalan database that includes one thousand speakers. This communication describes some experimental work that has been carried out using both the Spanish and the Catalan speech material. A speech recognition system has been trained for the Spanish language using a selection of the phonetically balanced utterances from the 4500 SpeechDat training sessions. Utterances with mispronounced or incomplete words and with intermittent noise were discarded. A set of 26 allophones was selected to account for the Spanish sounds and clustered demiphones have been used as context dependent sub-lexical units. Following the same methodology, a recognition system was trained from the Catalan SpeechDat database. Catalan sounds were described with 32 allophones. Additionally, a bilingual recognition system was built for both the Spanish and Catalan languages. By means of clustering techniques, the suitable set of allophones to cover simultaneously both languages was determined. Thus, 33 allophones were selected. The training material was built by the whole Catalan training material and the Spanish material coming from the Eastern region of Spain (the region where Catalan is spoken). The performance of the Spanish, Catalan and bilingual systems were assessed under the same framework. The Spanish system exhibits a significantly better performance than the rest of systems due to its better training. The bilingual system provides an equivalent performance to that afforded by both language specific systems trained with the Eastern Spanish material or the Catalan SpeechDat corpus.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

SVMs for Automatic Speech Recognition: a Survey

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are, undoubtedly, the most employed core technique for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Nevertheless, we are still far from achieving high-performance ASR systems. Some alternative approaches, most of them based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), were proposed during the late eighties and early nineties. Some of them tackled the ASR problem using predictive ANNs, while others proposed hybrid HMM/ANN systems. However, despite some achievements, nowadays, the preponderance of Markov Models is a fact. During the last decade, however, a new tool appeared in the field of machine learning that has proved to be able to cope with hard classification problems in several fields of application: the Support Vector Machines (SVMs). The SVMs are effective discriminative classifiers with several outstanding characteristics, namely: their solution is that with maximum margin; they are capable to deal with samples of a very higher dimensionality; and their convergence to the minimum of the associated cost function is guaranteed. These characteristics have made SVMs very popular and successful. In this chapter we discuss their strengths and weakness in the ASR context and make a review of the current state-of-the-art techniques. We organize the contributions in two parts: isolated-word recognition and continuous speech recognition. Within the first part we review several techniques to produce the fixed-dimension vectors needed for original SVMs. Afterwards we explore more sophisticated techniques based on the use of kernels capable to deal with sequences of different length. Among them is the DTAK kernel, simple and effective, which rescues an old technique of speech recognition: Dynamic Time Warping (DTW). Within the second part, we describe some recent approaches to tackle more complex tasks like connected digit recognition or continuous speech recognition using SVMs. Finally we draw some conclusions and outline several ongoing lines of research

On frequency averaging for spectral analysis in speech recognition

Many speech recognition systems use logarithmic filter-bank energies or a linear transformation of them to represent the speech signal. Usually, each of those energies is routinely computed as a weighted average of the periodogram samples that lie in the corresponding frequency band. In this work, we attempt to gain an insight into the statistical properties of the frequency-averaged periodogram (FAP) from which those energies are samples. Thus, we have shown that the FAP is statistically and asymptotically equivalent to a multiwindow estimator that arises from the Thomson’s optimization approach and uses orthogonal sinusoids as windows. The FAP and other multiwindow estimators are tested in a speech recognition application, observing the influence of several design factors. Particularly, a technique that is computationally simple like the FAP’s one, and which is equivalent to use multiple cosine windows, appears as an alternative to be taken into considerationPeer Reviewe

On frequency averaging for spectral analysis in speech recognition

Many speech recognition systems use logarithmic filter-bank energies or a linear transformation of them to represent the speech signal. Usually, each of those energies is routinely computed as a weighted average of the periodogram samples that lie in the corresponding frequency band. In this work, we attempt to gain an insight into the statistical properties of the frequency-averaged periodogram (FAP) from which those energies are samples. Thus, we have shown that the FAP is statistically and asymptotically equivalent to a multiwindow estimator that arises from the Thomson’s optimization approach and uses orthogonal sinusoids as windows. The FAP and other multiwindow estimators are tested in a speech recognition application, observing the influence of several design factors. Particularly, a technique that is computationally simple like the FAP’s one, and which is equivalent to use multiple cosine windows, appears as an alternative to be taken into considerationPeer Reviewe