Paper
Use of multilayer networks for the recognition of phonetic features and phonemes
Artificial neural networks capable of doing hard learning offer a new way to undertake automatic speech recognition. The Boltzmann machine algorithm and the error back‐propagation algorithm have been used to perform speaker normalization. Spectral segments are represented by spectral lines. Speaker‐independent recognition of place of articulation for vowels is performed on lines. Performance of the networks is shown to depend on the coding of the input data. Samples were extracted from continuous speech of 38 speakers. The error rate obtained (4.2% error on test set of 72 samples with the Boltzmann machine and 6.9% error with error back‐propagation) is better than that of previous experiments, using the same data, with continuous Hidden Markov Models (7.3% error on test set and 3% error on training set). These experiments are part of an attempt to construct a data‐driven speech recognition system with multiple neural networks specialized to different tasks. Results are also reported on the recognition performance of other trained networks, such as one trained on the E‐set consonants.
Authors: Yoshua Bengio · Renato De Mori