Applications of Dynamic Programming to Speech and Language Processing

Abstract

Dynamic programming (DP) is a mathematical programming technique for solving certain sequential optimization problems. In this paper, we focus our discussion on DP applications in the areas of speech and language processing. Because of the sequential nature of speech and language events, most applications can generally be formulated as a sequential decision process. DP can then be used to obtain the solution to these processes by decomposing them into a series of smaller local problems and solving them sequentially. It is impossible to give adequate treatment to each such application in this paper. Instead, we briefly illustrate the basic way in which DP techniques have been applied to several key areas of speech and language research in the Information Principles Research Laboratory. The applications discussed in this paper include speaker verification, speech recognition, speech synthesis, speech analysis, speech modeling, speech enhancement, speech segmentation, speech coding, speech transmission, language modeling, and natural language processing. These applications have been proven successful in enhancing human-machine communications.