An application of recurrent nets to phone probability estimation

Abstract

This paper presents an application of recurrent networks for phone probability estimation in large vocabulary speech recognition. The need for efficient exploitation of context information is discussed; a role for which the recurrent net appears suitable. An overview of early developments of recurrent nets for phone recognition is given along with the more recent improvements that include their integration with Markov models. Recognition results are presented for the DARPA TIMIT and Resource Management tasks, and it is concluded that recurrent nets are competitive with traditional means for performing phone probability estimation.