Articulatory feature recognition using dynamic Bayesian networks

We describe a dynamic Bayesian network for articulatory feature recognition. The model is intended to be a component of a speech recognizer that avoids the problems of conventional “beads-on-a-string” phoneme-based models. We demonstrate that the model gives superior recognition of articulatory features from the speech signal compared with a state-of-the-art neural network system. We also introduce a training algorithm that offers two major advances: it does not require time-aligned feature labels and it allows the model to learn a set of asynchronous feature changes in a data-driven manner.