Multiple-Regression Hidden Markov Model

Abstract

This paper proposes a new class of hidden Markov model (HMM) called multiple-regression HMM (MRHMM) that utilizes auxiliary features such as fundamental frequency (F0) and speaking styles that affect spectral parameters to better model the acoustic features of phonemes. Though such auxiliary features are considered to be the factors that degrade the performance of speech recognizers, the proposed MR-HMM adapts its model parameters, i.e. mean vectors of output probability distributions, depending on these auxiliary information to improve the recognition accuracy. Formulation for parameter reestimation of MRHMM based on the EM algorithm is given in the paper. Experiments of speaker-dependent isolated word recognition demonstrated that MR-HMMs using F0 based auxiliary features reduced the error rates by more than 20% compared with the conventional HMMs.