Consonant landmark detection for speech recognition

This thesis focuses on the detection of abrupt acoustic discontinuities in the speech signal, which constitute landmarks for consonant sounds. Because a large amount of phonetic information is concentrated near acoustic discontinuities, more focused speech analysis and recognition can be performed based on the landmarks. Three types of consonant landmarks are defined according to its characteristics -- glottal vibration, turbulence noise, and sonorant consonant -- so that the appropriate analysis method for each landmark point can be determined. A probabilistic knowledge-based algorithm is developed in three steps. First, landmark candidates are detected and their landmark types are classified based on changes in spectral amplitude. Next, a bigram model describing the physiologically-feasible sequences of consonant landmarks is proposed, so that the most likely landmark sequence among the candidates can be found. Finally, it has been observed that certain landmarks are ambiguous in certain sets of phonetic and prosodic contexts, while they can be reliably detected in other contexts. A method to represent the regions where the landmarks are reliably detected versus where they are ambiguous is presented. On TIMIT test set, 91% of all the consonant landmarks and 95% of obstruent landmarks are located as landmark candidates. The bigram-based process for determining the most likely landmark sequences yields 12% deletion and substitution rates and a 15% insertion rate. An alternative representation that distinguishes reliable and ambiguous regions can detect 92% of the landmarks and 40% of the landmarks are judged to be reliable. The deletion rate within reliable regions is as low as 5%.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Park, Chi-youn, 1981-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Kenneth N. Stevens.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/44905

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/44905