Effective Acoustic Model Clustering via Decision Tree with Supervised Decision Tree Learning

In the acoustic modeling for large vocabulary speech recognition, a sparse data problem caused by a huge number of context-dependent (CD) models usually leads the estimated models to being unreliable. In this paper, we develop a new clustering method based on the C45 decision-tree learning algorithm that effectively encapsulates the CD modeling. The proposed scheme essentially constructs a supervised decision rule and applies over the pre-clustered triphones using the C45 algorithm, which is known to effectively search through the attributes of the training instances and extract the attribute that best separates the given examples. In particular, the data driven method is used as a clustering algorithm while its result is used as the learning target of the C45 algorithm. This scheme has been shown to be effective particularly over the database of low unknown-context ratio in terms of recognition performance. For speaker-independent, task-independent continuous speech recognition task, the proposed method reduced the percent accuracy WER by 3.93% compared to the existing rule-based methods.