We study the problem of parameter estimation in continuous density hidden Markov models (CD-HMMs) for automatic speech recognition (ASR). As in support vector machines, we propose a learning algorithm based on the goal of margin maximization. Unlike earlier work on max-margin Markov networks, our approach is specifically geared to the modeling of real-valued observations (such as acoustic feature vectors) using Gaussian mixture models. Unlike previous discriminative frameworks for ASR, such as maximum mutual information and minimum classification error, our framework leads to a convex optimization, without any spurious local minima. The objective function for large margin training of CD-HMMs is defined over a parameter space of positive semidefinite matrices. Its optimization can be performed efficiently with simple gradient-based methods that scale well to large problems. We obtain competitive results for phonetic recognition on the TIMIT speech corpus.
Recently, REF have introduced an alternative discriminative density estimator based on max-margin, formulating a convex program.
Large margin hidden Markov models for automatic speech recognition
in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 19
Computer Science