Phonemic hidden Markov models with continuous mixture output densities for large vocabulary word recognition

The authors demonstrate the effectiveness of phonemic hidden Markov models with Gaussian mixture output densities (mixture HMMs) for speaker-dependent large-vocabulary word recognition. Speech recognition experiments show that for almost any reasonable amount of training data, recognizers using mixture HMMs consistently outperform those employing unimodal Gaussian HMMs. With a sufficiently large training set (e.g. more than 2500 words), use of HMMs with 25-component mixture distributions typically reduces recognition errors by about 40%. It is also found that the mixture HMMs outperform a set of unimodal generalized triphone models having the same number of parameters. Previous attempts to employ mixture HMMs for speech recognition proved discouraging because of the high complexity and computational cost in implementing the Baum-Welch training algorithm. It is shown how mixture HMMs can be implemented very simply in unimodal transition-based frameworks by allowing multiple transitions from one state to another.>