A Study on Word Juncture Modeling for Continuous Speech Recognition of Korean Language

In this paper, we study continuous speech recognition of Korean language using acoustic models of word juncture coarticulation. To alleviate the performance degradation due to coarticulation problems, we use context-dependent units that model inter-word transitions in addition to intra-word transitions. In all cases the initial phone of each word has to be specified for each possible final phone of the previous word similarly for the final phone of each word. To improve the robustness of the HMM parameters, the covariance matrix is smoothed. We also use position-dependent units to improve the discriminative power between units. Simulation results show that when the improved models of word juncture coarticulation are used. the recognition performance is considerably improved compared to the baseline system using only intra-word units.