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Abstract

Many discriminative classification algorithms are designed for tasks where samples can be represented by fixed-length vectors. However, many examples in the fields of text processing, computational biology and speech recognition are best represented as variable-length sequences of vectors. Although several dynamic kernels have been proposed for mapping sequences of discrete observations into fixed-dimensional feature-spaces, few kernels exist for sequences of continuous observations. This paper introduces continuous rational kernels, an extension of standard rational kernels, as a general framework for classifying sequences of continuous observations. In addition to allowing new task-dependent kernels to be defined, continuous rational kernels allow existing continuous dynamic kernels, such as Fisher and generative kernels, to be calculated using standard weighted finite-state transducer algorithms. Preliminary results on both a large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) task and the TIMIT database are presented.

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Correspondence to Martin Layton.

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Layton, M., Gales, M. Acoustic Modelling Using Continuous Rational Kernels. J VLSI Sign Process Syst Sign Im 48, 67–82 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-006-0027-4

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