We study the segmental recurrent neural network for end-to-end acoustic
modelling. This model connects the segmental conditional random field (CRF)
with a recurrent neural network (RNN) used for feature extraction. Compared to
most previous CRF-based acoustic models, it does not rely on an external system
to provide features or segmentation boundaries. Instead, this model
marginalises out all the possible segmentations, and features are extracted
from the RNN trained together with the segmental CRF. In essence, this model is
self-contained and can be trained end-to-end. In this paper, we discuss
practical training and decoding issues as well as the method to speed up the
training in the context of speech recognition. We performed experiments on the
TIMIT dataset. We achieved 17.3 phone error rate (PER) from the first-pass
decoding --- the best reported result using CRFs, despite the fact that we only
used a zeroth-order CRF and without using any language model.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, accepted by Interspeech 201