Neural networks for nonlinear discriminant analysis in continuous speech recognition

Abstract

In this paper neural networks for Nonlinear Discriminant Analysis in continuous speech recognition are presented. Multilayer Perceptrons are used to estimate a-posteriori probabilities for Hidden-Markov Model states, which are the optimal discriminant features for the separation of the HMM states. The a-posteriori probabilities are transformed by a principal component analysis to calculate the new features for semicontinuous HMMs, which are trained by the known Maximum-Likelihood training. The nonlinear discriminant transformation is used in speaker-independent phoneme recognition experiments and compared to the standard Linear Discriminant Analysis technique.