Tonal articulatory feature-based acoustic modeling for Chinese Putonghua speech recognition

The development of a Chinese Putonghua conversational Large Vocabulary Continues Speech Recognition (LVCSR) system using tonal articulatory tandem features is presented.A set of nine Articulatory Features (AF) that are used for classifying sounds and tones of Chinese Putonghua is given,and the posteriors of these nine AF classifiers are used as features in the Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR).In the experiment on Chinese Putonghua conversational LVCSR,compared with baseline ASR using standard acoustic features,the tonal AF-based ASR has a 6.8%decrease on Character Error Rate (CER).When the AF combinations with standard acoustic features at feature-level and word-level, the CER achieves 10.1%relative reduction.These results prove that the AF is effective to capture the characteristics of the speech pronunciations,and with the complementary information provided by standard acoustic features and AF, the combination system achieves better performances further.