Learning phonetic features using connectionist networks

  • Authors:
  • Raymond L. Watrous;Lokendra Shastri

  • Affiliations:
  • Siemens Research and Technology Laboratories, Princeton, NJ;Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania

  • Venue:
  • IJCAI'87 Proceedings of the 10th international joint conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 2
  • Year:
  • 1987

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Abstract

A method for learning phonetic features from speech data using connectionist networks is described. A temporal flow model is introduced in which sampled speech data flows through a parallel network from input to output units. The network uses hidden units with recurrent links to capture spectral/temporal characteristics of phonetic features. A supervised learning algorithm is presented which performs gradient descent in weight space using a coarse approximation of the desired output as an evaluation function. A simple connectionist network with recurrent links was trained on a single instance of the word pair "no" and "go", and successful learned a discriminatory mechanism. The trained network also correctly discriminated 98% of 25 other tokens of each word by the same speaker. A single integrated spectral feature was formed without segmentation of the input, and without a direct comparison of the two items.