Gaussian mixture selection using context-independent HMM

We address a method to efficiently select Gaussian mixtures for fast acoustic likelihood computation. It makes use of context-independent models for selection and back-off of corresponding triphone models. Specifically, for the k-best phone models by the preliminary evaluation, triphone models of higher resolution are applied, and others are assigned likelihoods with the monophone models. This selection scheme assigns more reliable back-off likelihoods to the un-selected states than the conventional Gaussian selection based on a VQ codebook. It can also incorporate efficient Gaussian pruning at the preliminary evaluation, which offsets the increased size of the pre-selection model. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves comparable performance as the standard Gaussian selection, and performs much better under aggressive pruning condition. Together with the phonetic tied-mixture modeling, acoustic matching cost is reduced to almost 14% with little loss of accuracy.