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ACL
2012

A Nonparametric Bayesian Approach to Acoustic Model Discovery

12 years 1 months ago
A Nonparametric Bayesian Approach to Acoustic Model Discovery
We investigate the problem of acoustic modeling in which prior language-specific knowledge and transcribed data are unavailable. We present an unsupervised model that simultaneously segments the speech, discovers a proper set of sub-word units (e.g., phones) and learns a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for each induced acoustic unit. Our approach is formulated as a Dirichlet process mixture model in which each mixture is an HMM that represents a sub-word unit. We apply our model to the TIMIT corpus, and the results demonstrate that our model discovers sub-word units that are highly correlated with English phones and also produces better segmentation than the state-of-the-art unsupervised baseline. We test the quality of the learned acoustic models on a spoken term detection task. Compared to the baselines, our model improves the relative precision of top hits by at least 22.1% and outperforms a language-mismatched acoustic model.
Chia-ying Lee, James R. Glass
Added 29 Sep 2012
Updated 29 Sep 2012
Type Journal
Year 2012
Where ACL
Authors Chia-ying Lee, James R. Glass
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