Discriminative utterance verification for connected digits recognition

Abstract

Utterance verification represents an important technology in the design of user-friendly speech recognition systems. It involves the recognition of keyword strings and the rejection of nonkeyword strings. This paper describes a hidden Markov model-based (HMM-based) utterance verification system using the framework of statistical hypothesis testing. The two major issues on how to design keyword and string scoring criteria are addressed. For keyword verification, different alternative hypotheses are proposed based on the scores of antikeyword models and a general acoustic filler model. For string verification, different measures are proposed with the objective of detecting nonvocabulary word strings and possibly erroneous strings (so-called putative errors). This paper also motivates the need for discriminative hypothesis testing in verification. One such approach based on minimum classification error training is investigated in detail. When the proposed verification technique was integrated into a state-of-the-art connected digit recognition system, the string error rate for valid digit strings was found to decrease by 57% when setting the rejection rate to 5%. Furthermore, the system was able to correctly reject over 99.9% of nonvocabulary word strings.