Considerations in applying clustering techniques to speaker-independent word recognition.

Recent work at Bell Laboratories has demonstrated the utility of applying sophisticated pattern recognition techniques to obtain a set of speaker‐independent word templates for an isolated word recognition system [Levinson et al., IEEE Trans. Acoust. Speech Signal Process. ASSP‐27 (2), 134–141 (1979); Rabiner et al., IEEE Trans. Acoust. Speech Signal Process.(in press)]. In these studies, it was shown that a careful experimenter could guide the clustering algorithms to choose a small set of templates that were representative of a large number of replications for each word in the vocabulary. Subsequent word recognition tests verified that the templates chosen were indeed representative of a fairly large population of talkers. Given the success of this approach, the next important step is to investigate fully automatic techniques for clustering multiple versions of a single word into a set of speaker‐independent word templates. Two such techniques are described in this paper. The first method uses distance ...