Phone Recognition Using Restricted Boltzmann Machines

For decades, Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) have been the state-of-the-art technique for acoustic modeling despite their unrealistic independence assumptions and the very limited representational capacity of their hidden states. Conditional Restricted Boltzmann Machines (CRBMs) have recently proved to be very effective for modeling motion capture sequences and this paper investigates the application of this more powerful type of generative model to acoustic modeling. On the standard TIMIT corpus, one type of CRBM outperforms HMMs and is comparable with the best other methods, achieving a phone error rate (PER) of 26.7% on the TIMIT core test set.