Speech recognition with dynamic Bayesian networks

Dynamic Bayesian networks (DBNs) are a useful tool for representing complex stochastic processes. Recent developments in inference and learning in DBNs allow their use in real-world applications. In this paper, we apply DBNs to the problem of speech recognition. The factored state representation enabled by DBNs allows us to explicitly represent long-term articulatory and acoustic context in addition to the phonetic-state information maintained by hidden Markov models (HMMs). Furthermore, it enables us to model the short-term correlations among multiple observation streams within single time-frames. Given a DBN structure capable of representing these long- and short-term correlations, we applied the EM algorithm to learn models with up to 500,000 parameters. The use of structured DBN models decreased the error rate by 12 to 29% on a large-vocabulary isolated-word recognition task, compared to a discrete HMM; it also improved significantly on other published results for the same task. This is the first successful application of DBNs to a large-scale speech recognition problem. Investigation of the learned models indicates that the hidden state variables are strongly correlated with acoustic properties of the speech signal.