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A stacked auto-encoder with scaled conjugate gradient algorithm for Malayalam ASR

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Abstract

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is entitled to automate natural speech perception and the processing mechanism through analysis in the linguistic and acoustic features of the speech signal. ASR for children is highly challenging due to their developing physical aspects and rapidly changing articulation features. Therefore, ASR for children is still at its infant level. In this work, a stacked multilayer auto-encoder (AE) network is designed for ASR of the Malayalam vowel, articulated by children in the age group of five to ten. The proposed network structured with an unsupervised pre-training followed by supervised training. The pre-training coupled with two layers of sparse auto-encoders and scaled conjugate gradient (SCG) algorithm used for back-propagation. The auto-encoders are used to pre-train the network in an unsupervised (self- supervised) manner with 40,500 features that include Mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) and its derivatives, spectrogram formants and zero crossing rate (ZCR). In the softmax layer, the pre-trained network retrained in a supervised manner with bottleneck features. Fine-tuning has been applied in the trained network to enhance its performance. The unsupervised and supervised layers are stacked together to form a comprehensive network. The designed network has shown an average accuracy of 97% in training and 89.5% accuracy in the test data-set.

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Abbreviations

ASR:

Automatic speech recognition

AE:

Auto-encoder

MFCC:

Mel frequency cepstral coefficients

SCG:

Scaled conjugate gradient

ZCR:

Zero crossing rate

HMM:

Hidden Markov model

ANNs:

Artificial neural networks

DBN:

Deep belief network

RBM:

Restricted Boltzmann machine

MOM:

Method of moments

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Kerala, Thiruvananthapuram, India

    Leena G. Pillai & D. Muhammad Noorul Mubarak

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  1. Leena G. Pillai
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  2. D. Muhammad Noorul Mubarak
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Correspondence to D. Muhammad Noorul Mubarak.

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Pillai, L.G., Mubarak, D.M.N. A stacked auto-encoder with scaled conjugate gradient algorithm for Malayalam ASR. Int. j. inf. tecnol. 13, 1473–1479 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41870-020-00573-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41870-020-00573-y

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