ISCA Archive Interspeech 2007
ISCA Archive Interspeech 2007

Acoustic-phonetic features for refining the explicit speech segmentation

Antonio Marcos Selmini, Fábio Violaro

This paper describes the refinement of the automatic speech segmentation into phones obtained via Hidden Markov Models (HMM). This refinement is based on acoustic-phonetic features associated to different phone classes. The proposed system was evaluated using both a small speaker dependent Brazilian Portuguese speech database and a speaker independent speech database (TIMIT). The refinement was applied to the boundaries obtained by just running the Viterbi's algorithm on the HMMs associated to the different utterances. Improvements of 30% and 13% were achieved in the percentage of segmentation errors below 20 ms for the speaker dependent and speaker independent databases respectively.