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Arabic phonemes recognition using hybrid LVQ/HMM model for continuous speech recognition

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Abstract

In attempt to increase the rate of Arabic phonemes recognition, we introduce a novel hybrid recognition algorithm. The algorithm is composed of the learning vector quantization (LVQ) and hidden Markov model (HMM). The hybrid algorithm used to recognizing Arabic phonemes in continuous open-vocabulary speech. A recorded Arabic corpus of different TV news for modern standard Arabic was used for training and testing purposes. We employ a data driven approach to generate the training feature vectors that embed the frame neighboring correlation information. Next, we generate the phonemes codebooks using the K-means splitting algorithm. Then, we trained the generated codebooks using the LVQ algorithm. We achieved a performance of 98.49 % during independent classification training and 90 % during dependent classification training. When using the trained LVQ codebooks in Arabic utterance transcription, the phoneme recognition rate was 72 % using LVQ only. We combined the LVQ codebooks with the single state HMM model using enhanced Viterbi algorithm which includes the phonemes bigrams. We achieved 89 % of Arabic phonemes recognition rate based on the hybrid LVQ/HMM algorithm.

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Notes

  1. Except for the first 3 frames and the last 3 frames in the feature matrix.

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Correspondence to Khalid M. O. Nahar.

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Nahar, K.M.O., Abu Shquier, M., Al-Khatib, W.G. et al. Arabic phonemes recognition using hybrid LVQ/HMM model for continuous speech recognition. Int J Speech Technol 19, 495–508 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10772-016-9337-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10772-016-9337-5

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