Hidden Markov Model Based Tigrigna Speech Recognition
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Date
2009-11
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
This study aims to design speaker independent continuous Tigrigna recognition system.
Tigrigna is a very productive language in terms of word forms because of its
agglutinative nature. All work is done in HTK (Hidden Markov Model Toolkit)
environment, except parsing and network transforming which utilizes perl programming
language.
In the process of building the recognizer, the speech data is recorded at a sampling rate
of 16KHz and the recorded speech is then converted into Mel Frequency Cepstral
Coefficient (MFCC) vectors for further analysis and processing. A corpus has been
developed to get the required data for training and testing the models. The corpus is a
database comprised of 250 utterances that are used for training and 50 sentences for
testing and evaluation. The data is preprocessed in line with the requirements of the HTK
toolkit. In order to support the acoustic models, a bigram language model is constructed.
In addition, pronunciation dictionary is prepared and used as an input.
Since the recognizer is designed to recognize continuous speech, Phonemes are used as
the basic unit of recognition. However phonemes are known to be context independent
units, given that the environment in which a sound is put makes a difference in the way it
is pronounced. Thus, after the monophone based speech recognizer is built, it is
promoted to triphone based system in which the left and right contexts are considered
and modeled.
The speech recognizer is then evaluated using the test dataset Performance result shows
60.32% word level correctness, 58.38% word accuracy, and 20 % sentence level
correctness are obtained. The results are encouraging and with more optimization works
better results can be achieved. To this ends further research works are recommended in
line with the analysis and finding of this study.
Key words: Speech Recognition, HMM, HMM based speech Recognition, Language
Modeling.
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Keywords
Speech Recognition, HMM, HMM based speech Recognition, Language Modeling.