A novel neural-based pronunciation modeling method for robust speech recognition

Abstract

This paper describes a recurrent neural network (RNN) based articulatory-phonetic inversion (API) model for improved speech recognition. And a specialized optimization algorithm is introduced to enable human-like heuristic learning in an efficient data-driven manner to capture the dynamic nature of English speech pronunciations. The API model demonstrates superior pronunciation modeling ability and robustness against noise contaminations in large-vocabulary speech recognition experiments. Using a simple rescoring formula, it improves the hidden Markov model (HMM) baseline speech recognizer with consistent error rates reduction of 5.30% and 10.14% for phoneme recognition tasks on clean and noisy speech respectively on the selected TIMIT datasets. And an error rate reduction of 3.35% is obtained for the SCRIBE-TIMIT word recognition tasks. The proposed system qualifies as a competitive candidate for profound pronunciation modeling with intrinsic salient features such as generality and portability.