Development and analysis of multilingual phone recognition systems using Indian languages

In this paper, the development of Multilingual Phone Recognition System (Multi-PRS) using four Indian languages—Kannada, Telugu, Bengali, and Odia—is described. Multi-PRS is an universal Phone Recognition System (PRS), which performs the phone recognition independent of any language. International phonetic alphabets based transcription is used for grouping the acoustically similar phonetic units from multiple languages. Multilingual phone recognisers for Indian languages are studied using two broad groups namely—Dravidian languages and Indo-Aryan languages. Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages are grouped separately to develop Bilingual PRSs. We have explored both HMMs and DNNs for developing PRSs under both context-dependent and context-independent setups. The state-of-the-art DNNs have outperformed the HMMs. The performance of Multi-PRSs is analysed and compared with that of the monolingual PRSs. The advantages of Multi-PRSs over monolingual PRSs are discussed. Further, we have developed tandem Multi-PRSs using phone posteriors as tandem features to improve the performance of the baseline Multi-PRSs. It is found that the tandem Multi-PRSs have outperformed the baseline Multi-PRSs in all the cases.