Probabilistic and Bottle-Neck Features for LVCSR of Meetings

In recent years, probabilistic features became an integral part of state-of-the-are LVCSR systems. In this work, we are exploring the possibility of obtaining the features directly from neural net without the necessity of converting output probabilities to features suitable for subsequent GMM-HMM system. We experimented with 5-layer MLP with bottle-neck in the middle layer. After training such a neural net, we used outputs of the bottle-neck as features for GMM-HMM recognition system. The benefits are twofold: first, improvement was gained when these features are used instead of the probabilistic features, second, the size of the system was reduced, as only part of the neural net is used. The experiments were performed on meetings recognition task defined in MST RT'05 evaluation.