Experiments on speaker-independent phone recognition using BREF

A series of experiments for speaker-independent, continuous speech phone recognition have been carried out using the recently recorded BREF corpus. The authors' experiments were the first to use this database, and are meant to provide a baseline performance evaluation for vocabulary independent phone recognition. The system was trained using hand-verified data from 43 speakers. Using 35 context-dependent phone models, a baseline phone accuracy of 60% (no phone grammar) has been obtained on an independent test set of 7635 phone segments from 19 speakers. Including phone bigram probabilities as phonotactic constraints results in a performance of 63.3%. A phone accuracy of 68.6% (73.3% correct) was obtained with 428 context dependent models.<<ETX>>