Syllable-a promising recognition unit for LVCSR

We present an attempt to model syllable level acoustic information as a viable alternative to the conventional phone level acoustic unit for large vocabulary continuous speech recognition. The motivation for this work were the inherent limitations in the phone based approach, primarily the decompositional nature and lack of larger scale temporal dependencies. We present preliminary but encouraging results on a syllable based recognition system which exceeds the performance of a comparable triphone system both in terms of word error rate (WER) and complexity. The WER of the best syllable system reported here was 49.1% on a standard SWITCHBOARD evaluation.