A Study on Korean Allophone Recognition Using Hierarchical Time-Delay Neural Network

계층구조 시간지연 신경망을 이용한 한국어 변이음 인식에 관한 연구

In many continuous speech recognition systems, phoneme is used as a basic recognition unit However, the coarticulation generated among neighboring phonemes makes difficult to recognize phonemes consistently. This paper proposes allophone as an alternative recognition unit. We have classified each phoneme into three different allophone groups by the location of phoneme within a syllable. For a recognition algorithm, time-delay neural network(TDNN) has been designed. To recognize all Korean allophones, TDNNs are constructed in modular fashion according to acoustic-phonetic features (e.g. voiced/unvoiced, the location of phoneme within a word). Each TDNN is trained independently, and then they are integrated hierarchically into a whole speech recognition system. In this study, we have experimented Korean plosives with phoneme-based recognition system and allophone-based recognition system. Experimental results show that allophone-based recognition is much less affected by the coarticulation.