Context-dependent phonetic Markov models for large vocabulary speech recognition

One approach to large vocabulary speech recognition, is to build phonetic Markov models, and to concatenate them to obtain word models. In previous work, we already designed a recognizer based on 40 phonetic Markov machines, which accepts a 10,000 words vocabulary ([3]), and recently 200,000 words vocabulary ([5]). Since there is one machine per phoneme, these models obviously do not account for coarticulatory effects, which may lead to recognition errors. In this paper, we improve the phonetic models by using general principles about coarticulation effects on automatic phoneme recognition. We show that both the analysis of the errors made by the recognizer, and linguistic facts about phonetic context influence, suggest a method for choosing context dependent models. This method allows to limit the growing of the number of phonems, and still account for the most important coarticulation effects. We present our experiments with a system applying these principles to a set of models for French. With this new system including context-dependant machines, the phoneme recognition rate goes from 82.2% to 85.3%, and the error rate on words with a 10,000 word dictionary, is decreased from 11.2 to 9.8%.