A phonetic segmentation procedure based on hidden markov models

Abstract

© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. In this paper, a novel variant of an automatic phonetic segmentation procedure is presented, especially useful if data is scarce. The procedure uses the Kaldi speech recognition toolkit as its basis, and combines and modifies several existing methods and Kaldi recipes. Both the specifics of model training and test data alignment are explained in detail. Effectiveness of artificial extension of the starting amount of manually labeled material during training is examined as well. Experimental results show the admirable overall correctness of the proposed procedure in the given test environment. Several variants of the procedure are compared, and the usage of speaker-adapted context-dependent triphone models trained without the expanded manually checked data is proven to produce the best results. A few ways to improve the procedure even more, as well as future work, are also discussed.