• Week 10

    Building a dictionary After I got SRILM installed I was ready to build a dictionary. The dictionary is a mapping between phonemes (or some other linguistic unit) to actual words. Within Kaldi, the script used for preparing such a dictionary is local/voxforge_prepare_dict.sh. This script downloads the CMU’s pronunciation dictionary and...

  • Week 9

    Concept slides This week I focused on trying to build a presentation or visualization for the ideas we discussed last week. I thought it would be a good exercise to showcase how we see our projects coming together. These sorts of presentation exercise are usually fruitful, not only in terms...

  • Week 8

    Group meeting For week 7 we had our 5th group meeting and talked about the different interesting directions our project could develop into. These sorts of conversations are usually difficult, but fun. Me and Rebekah also had weekly meeting. We actually haven’t had one of these in a couple of...

  • Week 7

    Quick recap: I’m learning to build an simple ASR system with Kaldi using VoxForge data as Kaldi has a couple of pre-built recipes available. This week I will try building and installing different language modeling toolkits. Building language models One of the language model toolkits I’m interested in is the...

  • Week 6

    Quick recap: I’m learning to build an simple ASR system with Kaldi using VoxForge (free) data as Kaldi has a couple of pre-built recipes available. Again, this is just a good way to get comfortable with building ASRs with Kaldi. Notes about Voxforge data There is a slight problem with...

  • Week 5

    Notes about modern day speech recognition In the year 2017 there exist a lot of resources for understanding the theoretical and practical applications of speech recognition. Unfortunately, one might initially misinterpreted this as, “learning to do speech recognition is straight-forward”. This is incorrect. I do think building a state of...

  • Week 4

    Group meeting For week 3 we had our third group meeting and talked about cataloging the CHILDES collection. Again, there are a lot of different corpora and perhaps too many for our speech recognition system. Additionally, Dr. Brumberg brought in one of his graduate students, Shadi to come listen. Her...

  • Week 3

    This week was spent on trying to get different open source speech recognition systems installed. I went through installing the HTK-toolkit, Kaldi, and CMU Sphinx. Because we first wanted to start with building a HMM-based speech recognition system I first attempted to install HTK. Of course, the installing process for...