Deep convolutional neural networks for acoustic modeling in low resource languages

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated powerful acoustic modelling capabilities due to their ability to account for structural locality in the feature space; and in recent works CNNs have been shown to often outperform fully connected Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) on TIMIT and LVCSR. In this paper, we perform a detailed empirical study of CNNs under the low resource condition, wherein we only have 10 hours of training data. We find a two dimensional convolutional structure performs the best, and emphasize the importance to consider time and spectrum in modelling acoustic patterns. We report detailed error rates across a wide variety of model structures and show CNNs consistently outperform fully connected DNNs for this task.