Bangla speech recognition using two stage multilayer neural networks

This paper describes a Bangla phoneme recognition method for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). The method consists of two stages: i) a multilayer neural network (MLN), which converts acoustic features, mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCCs), into phoneme probabilities and ii) the phoneme probabilities obtained from the first stage and corresponding Δ and ΔΔ are inserted into another MLN to improve the phoneme probabilities for the hidden Markov models (HMMs) by reducing the context effect. From the experiments on Bangla speech corpus prepared by us, it is observed that the proposed method provides higher phoneme recognition performance than the existing method. Moreover, it requires a fewer mixture components in the HMMs.