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In this paper, a minimum error rate pattern recognition approach to speech recognition is studied with particular emphasis on the speech recognizer designs based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) and Viterbi decoding. This approach differs from the traditional maximum likelihood based approach in that the objective of the recognition error rate minimization is established through a specially designed loss function, and is not based on the assumptions made about the speech generation process. Various theoretical and practical issues concerning this minimum error rate pattern recognition approach in speech recognition are investigated. The formulation and the algorithmic structures of several minimum error rate training algorithms for an HMM-based speech recognizer are discussed. The tree-trellis based N-best decoding method and a robust speech recognition scheme based on the combined string models are described. This approach can be applied to large vocabulary, continuous speech recognition tasks and to speech recognizers using word or subword based speech recognition units. Various experimental results have shown that significant error rate reduction can be achieved through the proposed approach.
Chou et al. (Tue,) studied this question.