Improving Phoneme Classification Performance Using Observation Context–Dependent Segment Models

Abstract

This article describes a novel method that models the correlation among acoustic observations in contiguous speech segments. The basic idea behind the method is that acoustic observations are conditioned not only on the phonetic context but also on the preceding acoustic segment observation. The correlation between consecutive acoustic observations is modeled by mean trajectory polynomial segment models (PSM). This method is an extension of conventional segment modeling approaches in that it describes the correlation of acoustic observations not only inside segments but also between contiguous segments. It is also a generalization of phonetic context (e.g., triphone) modeling approaches because it can model acoustic context and phonetic context at the same time. Using the proposed method in a speaker-independent phoneme classification test resulted in a 7 to 9% relative reduction of error rate as compared with the traditional triphone segmental model system and a 31% reduction as compared with a similar triphone hidden Markov model (HMM) system.