Spontaneous speech recognition using a statistical coarticulatory model for the vocal-tract-resonance dynamics

A statistical coarticulatory model is presented for spontaneous speech recognition, where knowledge of the dynamic, target-directed behavior in the vocal tract resonance is incorporated into the model design, training, and in likelihood computation. The principal advantage of the new model over the conventional HMM is the use of a compact, internal structure that parsimoniously represents long-span context dependence in the observable domain of speech acoustics without using additional, context-dependent model parameters. The new model is formulated mathematically as a constrained, nonstationary, and nonlinear dynamic system, for which a version of the generalized EM algorithm is developed and implemented for automatically learning the compact set of model parameters. A series of experiments for speech recognition and model synthesis using spontaneous speech data from the Switchboard corpus are reported. The promise of the new model is demonstrated by showing its consistently superior performance over a state-of-the-art benchmark HMM system under controlled experimental conditions. Experiments on model synthesis and analysis shed insight into the mechanism underlying such superiority in terms of the target-directed behavior and of the long-span context-dependence property, both inherent in the designed structure of the new dynamic model of speech. (C) 2000 Acoustical Society of America. [S0001-4966(00)02911-8].