A segmental-feature HMM using parametric trajectory model

We present a parametric trajectory model for characterizing segmental features and their interaction within the segmental HMMs. The trajectory is obtained by applying the design matrix which includes transitional information on contiguous frames, and it is characterized as a polynomial regression function. To apply the trajectory to the segmental HMM, the extra- and intra-segmental variations are modified to contain the trajectory information. We made some experiments to examine the characteristics of variances and the variabilities in a segment. The experimental results are reported on the TIMIT corpus and performance is shown to improve significantly over that of the conventional HMM.