Spontaneous speech recognition using HMMs

Abstract

This thesis describes a speech recognition system that was built to support spontaneous speech understanding. The system is composed of (1) a front end acoustic analyzer which computes Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, (2) acoustic models of context-dependent phonemes (triphones), (3) a back-off bigram statistical language model, and (4) a beam search decoder based on the Viterbi algorithm. The contextdependent acoustic models resulted in 67.9% phoneme recognition accuracy on the standard TIMIT speech database. Spontaneous speech was collected using a "Wizard of Oz" simulation of a simple spatial manipulation game. Naive subjects were instructed to manipulate blocks on a computer screen in order to solve a series of geometric puzzles using only spoken commands. A hidden human operator performed actions in response to each spoken command. The speech from thirteen subjects formed the corpus for the speech recognition results reported here. Using a task-specific bigram statistical language model and context-dependent acoustic models, the system achieved a word recognition accuracy of 67.6%. The recognizer operated using a vocabulary of 523 words. The recognition had a word perplexity of 36.