ISCA Archive Interspeech 2006
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2006

A constrained baum-welch algorithm for improved phoneme segmentation and efficient training

David Huggins-Daines, Alexander I. Rudnicky

We describe an extension to the Baum-Welch algorithm for training Hidden Markov Models that uses explicit phoneme segmentation to constrain the forward and backward lattice. The HMMs trained with this algorithm can be shown to improve the accuracy of automatic phoneme segmentation. In addition, this algorithm is significantly more computationally efficient than the full Baum-Welch algorithm, while producing models that achieve equivalent accuracy on a standard phoneme recognition task.