Malay Syllables Speech Recognition Using Hybrid Neural Network

This paper presents a hybrid neural network system which used a Self-Organizing Map and Multilayer Perceptron for the problem of Malay syllables speech recognition. The novel idea in this system is the usage of a two-dimension Self-organizing feature map as a sequential mapping function which transform the phonetic similarities or acoustic vector sequences of the speech frame into trajectories in a square matrix where elements take on binary values. This property simplifies the classification task. An MLP is then used to classify the trajectories that each syllable in the vocabulary corresponds to. The system performance was evaluated for recognition of 15 Malay common syllables. The overall performance of the recognizer showed to be 91.8%.