Explicit Duration Modeling Research Articles

A Logical Hierarchical Hidden Semi-Markov Model for Team Intention Recognition

Intention recognition is significant in many applications. In this paper, we focus on team intention recognition, which identifies the intention of each team member and the team working mode. To model the team intention as well as the world state and observation, we propose a Logical Hierarchical Hidden Semi-Markov Model (LHHSMM), which has advantages of conducting statistical relational learning and can present a complex mission hierarchically. Additionally, the LHHSMM explicitly models the duration of team working mode, the intention termination, and relations between the world state and observation. A Logical Particle Filter (LPF) algorithm is also designed to infer team intentions modeled by the LHHSMM. In experiments, we simulate agents’ movements in a combat field and employ agents’ traces to evaluate performances of the LHHSMM and LPF. The results indicate that the team working mode and the target of each agent can be effectively recognized by our methods. When intentions are interrupted within a high probability, the LHHSMM outperforms a modified logical hierarchical hidden Markov model in terms of precision, recall, andF-measure. By comparing performances of LHHSMMs with different duration distributions, we prove that the explicit duration modeling of the working mode is effective in team intention recognition.

Acoustic modeling problem for automatic speech recognition system: advances and refinements (Part II)

In automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, hidden Markov models (HMMs) have been widely used for modeling the temporal speech signal. As discussed in Part I, the conventional acoustic models used for ASR have many drawbacks like weak duration modeling and poor discrimination. This paper (Part II) presents a review on the techniques which have been proposed in literature for the refinements of standard HMM methods to cope with their limitations. Current advancements related to this topic are also outlined. The approaches emphasized in this part of review are connectionist approach, explicit duration modeling, discriminative training and margin based estimation methods. Further, various challenges and performance issues such as environmental variability, tied mixture modeling, and handling of distant speech signals are analyzed along with the directions for future research.

Discriminative training and explicit duration modeling for HMM-based automatic segmentation

HMM-based automatic segmentation has been popularly used for corpus construction for concatenative speech synthesis. Since the most important reasons for the inaccuracy of HMM-based automatic segmentation are the HMM training criterion and duration control, we will study these particular issues. For the HMM training, we apply the discriminative training method and introduce a new criterion, named Minimum SeGmentation Error (MSGE). In this method, a loss function directly related to the segmentation error is defined, and parameter optimization is performed by the Generalized Probabilistic Descent (GPD) algorithm. For the duration control problem, we apply explicit duration models and propose a two-step-based segmentation method to solve the problem of computational cost, where the duration model is incorporated in a postprocessor procedure. From the experimental results, these two techniques significantly improve segmentation accuracy with different focuses, where the MSGE-based discriminative training focuses on improving the accuracy of sensitive boundary, i.e., a boundary where an error in segmentation is likely to cause a noticeable degradation in speech synthesis quality, and the explicit duration modeling focuses on eliminating large errors. After combining these two techniques, the error average was reduced from 6.86 ms to 5.79 ms on Japanese data, and from 8.67 ms to 6.61 ms on Chinese data. Simultaneously, the number of errors larger than 30 ms were reduced 25% and 51% on Chinese and Japanese data, respectively.

A Parallel Implementation of a Hidden Markov Model with Duration Modeling for Speech Recognition

Hidden Markov models (HMMs) are currently the most successful paradigm for speech recognition. Although explicit duration continuous HMMs more accurately model speech than HMMs with implicit duration modeling, the cost of accurate duration modeling is often considered prohibitive. This paper describes a parallel implementation of an HMM with explicit duration modeling for spoken language recognition on the MasPar MP-1. The MP-1 is a fine-grained SIMD architecture with 16384 processing elements (PEs) arranged in a 128 × 128 mesh. By exploiting the massive parallelism of explicit duration HMMs, development and testing is practical even for large amounts of data. The result of this work is a parallel speech recognizer that can train a phone recognizer in real time. We present several extensions that include context dependent modeling, word recognition, and implicit duration HMMs.