Automatic question generation for decision tree based state tying

Decision tree based state tying uses so-called phonetic questions to assign triphone states to reasonable acoustic models. These phonetic questions are in fact phonetic categories such as vowels, plosives or fricatives. The assumption behind this is that context phonemes which belong to the same phonetic class have a similar influence on the pronunciation of a phoneme. For a new phoneme set, which has to be used e.g. when switching to a different corpus, a phonetic expert is needed to define proper phonetic questions. In this paper a new method is presented which automatically defines good phonetic questions for a phoneme set. This method uses the intermediate clusters from a phoneme clustering algorithm which are reduced to an appropriate number afterwards. Recognition results on the Wall Street Journal data for within-word and acrossword phoneme models show competitive performance of the automatically generated questions with our best handcrafted question set.