Multilingual and multimode phone recognition system for Indian languages

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to develop a flexible framework capable of automatically recognizing phonetic units present in a speech utterance of any language spoken in any mode. In this study, we considered two modes of speech: conversation and read modes in four Indian languages, namely, Telugu, Kannada, Odia, and Bengali. The proposed approach consists of two stages: (i) Automatic speech mode classification (SMC) and (ii) Automatic phoneme recognition using mode-specific multilingual phone recognition system (MMPRS). The vocal tract and excitation source features are considered for classifying speech modes using feed forward neural networks (FFNNs). The vocal tract, excitation source, and tandem features are used in training deep neural network (DNN)-based multilingual phone recognition systems (MPRSs). The performance of the proposed approach is compared with baseline mode-dependent and mode-independent MPRSs. Experimental results show that the proposed approach which combines both SMC and MMPRS into a single system outperforms the baseline phone recognition systems.