Syllable-based large vocabulary continuous speech recognition

Most large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) systems in the past decade have used a context-dependent (CD) phone as the fundamental acoustic unit. We present one of the first robust LVCSR systems that uses a syllable-level acoustic unit for LVCSR on telephone-bandwidth speech. This effort is motivated by the inherent limitations in phone-based approaches-namely the lack of an easy and efficient way for modeling long-term temporal dependencies. A syllable unit spans a longer time frame, typically three phones, thereby offering a more parsimonious framework for modeling pronunciation variation in spontaneous speech. We present encouraging results which show that a syllable-based system exceeds the performance of a comparable triphone system both in terms of word error rate (WER) and complexity. The WER of the best syllabic system reported here is 49.1% on a standard Switchboard evaluation, a small improvement over the triphone system. We also report results on a much smaller recognition task, OGI Alphadigits, which was used to validate some of the benefits syllables offer over triphones. The syllable-based system exceeds the performance of the triphone system by nearly 20%, an impressive accomplishment since the alphadigits application consists mostly of phone-level minimal pair distinctions