Important factors in HMM-based phonetic segmentation

Abstract

When doing research into or building systems involving spoken language, one invariably relies on relevantly annotated speech data for analysis and incorporation into such systems. The authors investigate methods and parameters for a baseline phonetic segmentation system on a few South African languages with the intention of determining how accurately they can apply basic methods and characterising typical deficiencies with the goal of defining further refinement strategies. An HMM-based system with a single mixture per triphone is found to work well, though the accurate segmentation of plosives remains a challenge. Suggestions for addressing this challenge are presented