Connectionist Speech Recognition: Status and Prospects

We report on recent advances in the ICSI connectionist speech recognition project. Highlights include: • Experimental results showing that connectionist methods can improve the performance of a context independent maximum likelihood trained HMM system, resulting in a performance close to that achieved using state of the art context dependent HMM systems of much higher complexity. • Mixing (context independent) connectionist probability estimates with maximum likelihood trained context dependent models to improve the performance of a state of the art system • The development of a network decomposition method that allows connectionist modelling of context dependent phones eeciently and parsimoniously, with no statistical independence assumptions.