Landmark-Guided Segmental Speech Decoding for Continuous Mandarin Speech Recognition

In this paper, we propose a framework that attempts to incorporate landmarks into a segment-based Mandarin speech recognition system. In this method, landmarks provide boundary information and phonetic class information, and the information is used to direct the decoding process. To prove the validity of this method, two kinds of landmarks that can be reliably detected are used to direct the decoding process of a segment model (SM) based Mandarin LVCSR (large vocabulary continuous speech recognition) system. The results of our experiment show that about 30% decoding time can be saved without an obvious decrease in recognition accuracy. Thus, the potential of our method is demonstrated.