Competing hidden Markov models on the self-organizing map

This paper presents an unsupervised segmentation method for feature sequences based on competitive-learning hidden Markov models. Models associated with the nodes of the self-organizing map learn to become selective to the segments of temporal input sequences. Input sequences may have arbitrary lengths. Segment models emerge then on the map through an unsupervised learning process. The method was tested in speech recognition, where the performance of the emergent segment models was as good as the performance of the traditionally used linguistic speech segment models. The benefits of the proposed method are the use of unsupervised learning for obtaining the state models for temporal data and the convenient visualization of the state space on the two-dimensional map