1. Introduction
Continuous speech recognition has been an area of active research for quite some time now. However when compared to languages like English or French, the state of speech research involving Indian languages is yet to gain momentum. Although some amount of effective research has gone into the development of speech recognizers in Hindi [1] and some south Indian Languages [2], the research scenario for Bengali language is far from satisfactory. In course of our effort to create a continuous speech recognizer for Bengali, we came across certain issues involving the generation of robust acoustic models for Bengali.