Use of neural networks for the recognition of place of articulation

The Boltzmann machine algorithm and the error back propagation algorithm were used to learn to recognize the place of articulation of vowels (front, center or back), represented by a static description of spectral lines. The error rate is shown to depend on the coding. Results are comparable or better than those obtained by us on the same data using hidden Markov models. The authors also show a fault tolerant property of the neural nets, i.e. that the error on the test set increases slowly and gradually when an increasing number of nodes fail