Articulatory motivated acoustic features for speech recognition

In this paper, we consider the use of multiple acoustic features of the speech signal for continuous speech recognition. A novel articulatory motivated acoustic feature is introduced, namely the spectrum derivative feature. The new feature is tested in combination with the standard Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and the voicedness features. Linear Discriminant Analysis is applied to find the optimal combination of different acoustic features. Experiments have been performed on small and large vocabulary tasks. Significant improvements in word error rate have been obtained by combining the MFCC feature with the articulatory motivated voicedness and spectrum derivative features: improvements of up to 25% on the small-vocabulary task and improvements of up to 4% on the large-vocabulary task relative to using MFCC alone with the same overall number of parameters in the system.