Classification of Consonants by SOM and LVQ

Abstract

In an effort to the practical realization of phonetic typewriter, we concentrate on the classification of consonants in this paper. Since many of consonants do not show periodic behavior in time domain and thus the validity for Fourier analysis of them are not convincing, vector quantization (VQ) via LBG clustering is first performed to check if the feature vectors of MFCC and LPCC are ever meaningful for consonants. Experimental results of VQ showed that it's not easy to draw a clear-cut conclusion as to the validity of Fourier analysis for consonants. For classification purpose, two kinds of neural networks are employed in our study: self organizing map (SOM) and learning vector quantization (LVQ). Results from SOM revealed that some pairs of phonemes are not resolved. Though LVQ is free from this difficulty inherently, the classification accuracy was found to be low. This suggests that, as long as consonant classification by LVQ is concerned, other types of feature vectors than MFCC should be deployed in parallel. However, the combination of MFCC/LVQ was not found to be inferior to the classification of phonemes by language-moded based approach. In all of our work, LPCC worked worse than MFCC.