INTEGRATING ARTICULATORY FEATURES USING KULLBACK-LEIBLER DIVERGENCE BASED ACOUSTIC MODEL FOR PHONEME RECOGNITION

In this paper, we propose a novel framework to integrate articulatory features (AFs) into HMM- based ASR system. This is achieved by using posterior probabilities of different AFs (estimated by multilayer perceptrons) directly as observation features in Kullback-Leibler divergence based HMM (KL-HMM) system. On the TIMIT phoneme recognition task, the proposed framework yields a phoneme recognition accuracy of 72.4% which is comparable to KL-HMM system using posterior probabilities of phonemes as features (72.7%). Furthermore, a best performance of 73.5% phoneme recognition accuracy is achieved by jointly modelling AF probabilities and phoneme probabilities as features. This shows the efficacy and flexibility of the proposed approach.