Phone deactivation pruning in large vocabulary continuous speech recognition

In this letter, we introduce a new pruning strategy for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition based on direct estimates of local posterior phone probabilities, This approach is well suited to hybrid connectionist/hidden Markov model systems. Experiments on the Wall Street Journal task using a 20000 word vocabulary and a trigram language model have demonstrated that phone deactivation pruning can increase the speed of recognition-time search by up to a factor of 10, with a relative increase in error rate of less than 2%.