Japanese Vowel Sound Classification Using Fuzzy Inference System

Abstract

An automatic speech recognition system is one of the popular research problems. There are many research groups working in this field for different language including Japanese. Japanese vowel recognition is one of important parts in the Japanese speech recognition system. The vowel classification system with the Mamdani fuzzy inference system was developed in this research. We tested our system on the blind test data set collected from one male native Japanese speaker and four male non-native Japanese speakers. All subjects in the blind test data set were not the same subjects in the training data set. We found out that the classification rate from the training data set is 95.0 %. In the speaker-independent experiments, the classification rate from the native speaker is around 70.0 %, whereas that from the non-native speakers is around 80.5 %.